In recent years, the Northeast Region of Brazil has become the center of the country’s film production industry and has caught the attention of festivals worldwide, with some of the most important awards being given to Brazilian filmmakers over the last two decades. Is there a Northeast wave ready to make Brazilian cinema a new cultural soft power?

I spoke with some of the most important filmmakers in the region to get some answers.  Director Gabriel Mascaro told me,

At the end of last century, Northeast filmmakers got tired of aligning their work with the expectations of the Brazilian movie industry dominated by a carioca (Rio de Janeiro) look. That stimulated more independent and original productions, which connected with international filmographie’s expectations. Today, some TV and streaming companies have begun to wake up to this potential. Streaming bet on us and are getting good results.

Mascaro won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for his movie Neon Bull (2015), which also won the Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. Neon Bull tells the story of Iremar, who works for a rodeo in northeastern Brazil. He lives in the truck that transports the rodeo animals, where he dreams of a future as a tailor in the region’s booming clothing industry.

Far from Rio

Brazilian audiovisual production has been historically concentrated in major southeastern cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Rio is where TV Globo operates, the largest TV company in Latin America and among the world’s five biggest commercial television stations. For the last four decades, TV Globo has been exporting telenovelas to almost one hundred nations, making it one of Brazil’s most successful exporters of cultural soft power. The drama Escrava Isaura (Isaura the Slave) was distributed in 104 countries and watched by around 1 billion viewers in China alone.

However, in Brazilian cinema, the Northeast Region generates the most award-winning films globally. “There has always been a tradition of cinema in the Northeast, since the silent cinema of Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, of the 1920s. It also helps that great writers are from the region, like Gilberto Freyre. It’s not a surprise that Northeast cinema would explode in the world someday. Northeast filmmakers make their films with local colors, local music, local accents and strong cultures that leverage comedies and dramas. The great inheritance of the New Cinema movement is the decision to take risks with an inventive and pulsating cinema,” says Marcelo Gomes.

Gomez won the Cinema Prize of the French National Education System at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005 for his film Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures and the Silver Q-Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival for Paloma (2022).

The 2005 film tells the story of two men who meet in Brazil’s arid northeastern backlands in 1942. One of the men is a German refugee who travels through cities as an aspirin salesman. The more recent 2022 film is the touching story of Paloma, a farmer who wants a traditional church wedding with her boyfriend Zé, but is refused by local priests because she is a transgender woman.

Paloma, directed by Marcelo Gomes. Used with permission.

Big box offices

Half a century ago, the New Cinema movement put Brazilian cinema on the world map for the first time, with movies that emphasized social inequality and intellectualism. Influenced by Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, it helped Brazilian filmmakers win the most important international awards.

Glauber Rocha won the Fipresci Prize at the Cannes Film Festival with Entranced Earth (1967) and Best Director at Cannes for Antonio das Mortes (1969). Nelson Pereira dos Santos won the Ocic Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Dry Lives (1964), based on the book by the Northeastern writer Graciliano Ramos. Lastly, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade won Best Film at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival for Macunaíma, a surreal comedy and social commentary about a lazy hero who leaves the backlands with his brothers.

However, none of these films from the New Cinema movement made waves with substantial audiences in Brazil. They were less popular because they were seen as too intellectual and superficial, unlike telenovelas.

“The explanation for this is exoticism. International festivals have a very reductant view about Brazil, like if we were zoo animals. Exoticism really matters. Stories about communities in the Northeast, indigenous, quilombolas (afro-Brazilian residents of quilombo settlements, first established by escaped slaves in Brazil) end up gaining great resonance. There’s also a certain historical guilt, a certain desire for reparation, for being colonialists for too long. There are also the stereotypes that we are less developed and very virulent. Movies with those aspects get more attention outside,” says Aly Muritiba.

Muritiba won Best Film at the Venice Film Festival for Private Desert (2021), about a suspended police officer who goes to the Northeast to meet a mysterious woman and falls in love with her, but then discovers that she is transgender. 

Rio de Janeiro is still the source of some of Brazil’s most successful box office hits. Central Station (1998), nominated for Best Foreign Film and Best Actress at the Academy Awards, was seen by 1.6 million people. City of God (2002) received four Academy Award nominations and was seen by 3.4 million viewers. Elite Squad (2007) won the Golden Berlin Bear in the Berlin International Film Festival and was seen by 2.4 million viewers. The sequel, Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within, was seen by 11 million in theaters. Recently, Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here (2024) reached 2 million viewers and is in the running for Academy Award nominations. It tells the story of a congressman who was kidnapped and murdered during Brazil’s military dictatorship. All of these films were produced and set in Rio de Janeiro.

However, the numbers show the Northeast is fighting back. The region’s first phenomenon was A Dog’s Will (2000), based on a classic story by the northeastern writer Ariano Suassuna. It was a huge success as a TV show and a film, seen by 2.2 million people in theaters. On TV, productions located in and based on popular stories from the Northeast were distributed by TV Globo internationally.

Today is Maria’s Day (2005), nominated for best miniseries at the International Emmy Awards is one example. Another is Bacurau, directed by Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho, it won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, extremely violent and erotic, is about a city where strange things happen after the death of the city’s matriarch. With clear similarities to New Cinema, but with commercial appeal, it was seen by almost eight hundred thousand in theaters. 

Recently, Prime Video’s New Bandits (2023), directed by Aly Muritiba and Fabio Mendonça, became an international hit. It was a Top 10 show in 49 countries, including 24 African countries, 9 Asian countries, Canada, Portugal and Brazil. It is one of the more recent shows produced in Brazil at this level of sophistication.

The show is a modern version of The Bandit (1953), about a man who terrorizes poor villages in the Northeast of Brazil. It was renewed for a second season and won the International Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

A new cultural soft power?

Is the wave of Northeastern cinema a new Brazilian soft power? “Yes!” says Halder Gomes, a comedy director based in the region. “Northeast movies are desired and hoped for by international festival curators. They already know that the region is a hotbed of potent films. Northeast cinema is already a ‘commodity,’ in a good way, in international festivals.” Half a million viewers have seen the local Cine Holliúdy in theaters and O Shaolin do Sertão (2016) has been seen by over six hundred thousand in theaters.

Both productions generated sequels, spin-offs and TV versions for TV Globo and Netflix. “But I think there must have been a political will among the states of the region and the federal government to make the Northeast cinema a soft power. A will to expand, distribute, the same strategy the American government did with Hollywood in the 1940s and South Korea is doing today,” Aly Muritiba reminds us.

That may be true. But not even political will can turn a cultural product into soft power without genuine artistic talent behind it. Today, the Northeast of Brazil is a hub for great filmmaking.

Besides the filmmakers above, the region also gave the world Sergio Machado, winner of the Award of the Youth at the Cannes Film Festival with Lower City (2005); Claudio Assis, winner of the CICAE Award at the Berlin International Film Festival with Mango Yellow (2005); and Monique Gardenberg, whose TV version of her movie Ó pai, Ó was nominated for an international Emmy in 2009.

The region’s Karim Ainouz, nominated for Berlin’s Golden Berlin with his Futuro Beach (2014) and Cannes’ Palme d’Or and Queer Palm for Motel Destino (2024), tells stories set in the northeast state of Ceará in both films.

Brazil’s cultural products have exerted soft power in the past. Bossa Nova seduced the ears and hearts of the world beginning in the 1950s. In the 2000s, funk and trap became the new move. Brazil’s Carnival festival is still one of the most celebrated events in the world, attracting millions of tourists from across the globe.

However, all these cultural phenomena have been centered around Rio de Janeiro. Maybe now is the time for the stories and artists of the Northeast to shine brighter and become a new center for Brazil’s cultural soft power.

[Joey T. McFadden edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The Northeast Cinema Wave: A New Center of Soft Power for Brazil? appeared first on Fair Observer.

These questions followed me since I began researching for my book Poder Suave — Soft Power, launched in Brazil in 2017. That following year, my book was a finalist in the Jabuti Awards, the most important literary award in Latin America under the creative economy category, which recognizes artistic contributions to economic growth. I focused my research on cultural soft power — power that is seductive and that draws in viewers worldwide. Some examples include Hollywood and Bollywood movies, French fashion, Russian ballet, the British Invasion of the 1960s (bands like the Beatles) and Brazilian bossa nova, Carnaval and telenovelas.

A general conclusion from my research shows that what society deems as desirable, such as believing one actor is persuasive or buying into certain fashion choices, is built upon accepted trends. With corporate and governmental support, these manifestations of “soft power” can reach new heights — like how Russia used ballet as a diplomatic tool during the Soviet era. Cultural influence is not limited to wealthy countries. Indian film and Brazilian music, for example, both reach wide international audiences.

Via the author.

However, the importance of trends, while real, did not satisfy my curiosity. I pondered over why some underprivileged creatives emerge onto the global stage, whereas other artists never reach their potential, despite having numerous advantages. What is the secret behind their success or failure?

I investigated this unsolved mystery in my doctoral thesis on socio-cultural progress with the help of the Capes Foundation Scholarship (Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education). After five years of research, my thesis and newest book Poder Cultural finally provides the answers.

First, cultural power is the ability to universally influence people into thinking a movie, work of art or related product is good. Cultural power can move other countries’ economies, shape consumer habits and create new industries. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, for instance, contributed $4.3 billion to the US GDP, according to Bloomberg Economics. The tour largely boosted the hospitality industry, including hotels, local businesses and tourism revenues.

Even writers go through an audiovisual medium, such as movies, TV shows, telenovelas or social media, to make their books relevant. Keila Shaheen was an unknown writer until her video went viral on TikTok and promoted Shadow Work Journal to a bestseller.

Relevant politics in cultural power

Research has proven that artists with culturally relevant attitudes and products are more likely to become powerful. Emerald Fennel had never won an award as an actress, writer or director until her movie Promising Young Woman won the 2020 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Its violence, not unlike films such as First Blood, spoke to young media consumers who are sensitive to themes of female oppression and Eurocentrism.

Another example is Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, who is better known in India than Brad Pitt. How is that possible? Khan is an undoubtedly attractive man. This fact alone gets him attention in the movie industry. In the beginning, Khan, like Pitt, used his good looks to obtain roles, even cheap flicks that would only be watched once. After ascending to stardom, Khan was able to reinvent his image by selecting roles with more cultural relevance. Take Khan’s performance as the alcoholic in Devdas (2002), which brought awareness to the struggles of addiction. 

Both Khan and Pitt support international causes that positively shape their images: Pitt is involved with One Campaign, which fights against AIDS and poverty in poor countries; Khan is the ambassador of Pulse Polio, the National AIDS Control Organization and the Make-a-Wish Foundation in India. However, Khan has one notable advantage over his competitor. He has a greater command over social media, which he uses to mobilize his appeal to millions. Khan posts about his children and his long marriage to Gauri Chibber. His 42 million followers on Facebook, 30 million on Instagram and 42 million on Twitter eat up his family narrative. Days after his interview with David Letterman on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, the television host named him “the greatest star of the world.”

Major components of disproportionate recognition

Both stars and politicians use social media to increase their power. In the music world, video clips are the most important audiovisual tool for singers to achieve cultural strength. Musicians Dua Lipa and Anitta must know this well. Their power extrapolates to music. In 2020, Dua Lipa posted a video for her 46 million followers on Instagram, criticizing the way the Israeli Defense Forces treat Palestinians. Israeli NGO Im Tirtzu opened a petition demanding that Dua Lipa’s songs be banned from the Israeli army radio, the most popular in the country, although her request was not granted. Likewise, Brazilian, far-right, former president Jair Bolsonaro criticized Anitta on his social media for supporting the legalization of marijuana. Bolsonaro also used this platform to denounce former candidate and then-elected president Lula in the 2022 election over her views on the use of the Brazilian flag. 

Dua Lipa and Anitta’s content share similarities regarding aesthetics, techniques and lyrics. However, what makes Dua Lipa more effective, despite Anitta launching twice as many videos, is another crucial aspect for cultural power: language. Dua Lipa has always sung in the most popular language in the world, English, which helped close publicity contracts for the singer.  She also developed her career in one of the world’s fashion capitals, London. Located outside any “English centers,” Anitta invested in more English videos, like “Girl from Rio,” “Downtown,” “Faking Love,” and “Boys Don’t Cry” to be more widely noticed.

Are these aspects to obtain cultural power fair? Definitely not. Because of these constraints, many culturally significant artists are ignored.  Helena Solberg, for instance, was the only female director from Cinema Novo, the Brazilian New Cinema movement from the 1960’s and the most important film movement of the southern hemisphere. Her movies discussed the roots of the underdevelopment situation in Latin America. She lived from 1971 to 1990 in the US and gained recognition with movies like The Brazilian Connection (1983), Home of the Brave (1986) and Carmen Miranda — Bananas is My Business (1994).  However, none of her films infiltrated Hollywood since they were independent productions, giving her much less cultural power than expected. 

Another example of disproportionate, language-biased representation is the career of Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye.  She was the mother of African cinema and the first Sub-Saharan African woman to direct a commercially distributed feature film, Kaddu Beykat, released in 1975. Her movies were essential to understand the lives of women in African tribes, a genre which had not been explored. Yet, she was never given global recognition since her films were in languages like Serer and Wolof, African dialects that remain absent from Google. Faye’s death in 2024 was mostly ignored by major news channels and cultural magazines in the Western world. The case of Safi Faye proves that what is available to Western viewers is very much regulated by Eurocentric cultural tastes.

The purpose of researching Poder Cultural was not only to understand the unspoken rules in achieving stardom, but mainly to show how the dice are rolled in arts and entertainment industries across countries of differing wealth and privilege. Exposing inequality and analyzing success are the most important steps to change the rules of the game and, therefore, make cultural power more accessible to all. 

[Gwyneth Campbell and Jamie Leung edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What Gives an Artist Profitable Cultural Power in the World? appeared first on Fair Observer.

All of the studios were founded in the first decades of the 20th century by immigrants with little or no experience in art or entertainment. And most of them, with little money. They skyrocketed to wealth in the mid-1920’s, beginning with a new system that controlled actors, movie distribution and film showings in the US and abroad.

In the previous century, Hollywood studios faced the same challenges, from the 1929 crisis to the blockbuster era that began in 1977 with Star Wars. These regenerations cut the marketing department’s film budget and major decision center in half. These changes parallel the modern-day effect of new players Apple and Amazon which penetrate Hollywood to its core and wield even more power than Netflix.

Apple Inc’s stock market value reached $3 trillion for the first time last June. Apple TV+ was launched in 2019. It was housed in a newly created 550,000 square foot studio in Culver City and received a record number of 54 Emmy Award nominations in 2023, with Severance being the only series to earn Best Drama and Best New Series in the same year. Amazon is now the world’s fifth largest publicly traded company and worth $1.3 trillion. Prime Video was launched in 2006 covering 200 countries. Amazon MGM Studios racked up 68 Emmy nominations in 2023, its first year with Amazon. Amazon Prime Video show The Marvelous Maisel (2017-2023) won 80 Nominations and 22 Emmys during its five seasons, making it the most celebrated streaming TV comedy in history.

Meanwhile, historically significant Hollywood studios disappeared. Responsible for the production of movies like Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009), Walt Disney Studios bought 20th Century Fox in 2019. Its movies and series streamed on a separate service, Star+, in regions like Latin America. Disney announced in December 2023 that Star+ would no longer exist and all its content would be transferred to Disney+. Another major film studio of the last century, Columbia Pictures, never even had a streaming service. Its shows dispersed over many disparate platforms. Last May, HBO Max acquired Disney brand Discovery+ and renamed it Max.

Dominance of streaming

More streaming mergers are expected to happen in the following years. Across this battlefield tech companies which own streaming services are more likely to absorb what is left of historically recognized film studios. The modern era is not the first time a non-art-and-entertainment company bought a Hollywood studio. In 1982, Coca-Cola acquired Columbia Pictures for 750 million USD. Yet their efforts were hampered by the fickle entertainment business which nearly drove them to shelve classic movies like Ghostbusters (1984). Just seven years later in 1989, Coca-Cola sold Columbia for the Japanese Sony Pictures.

Unlike Columbia under Sony Pictures, tech companies like Amazon and Apple have achieved success — Emmy and Oscar nominations and awards — without a previous Hollywood studio under its umbrella. Tech brands absorb Hollywood soft power, the ability to seduce rather than coerce in areas like arts and entertainment. Sony Pictures, for instance, has invested over 3 billion USD in Columbia Pictures. What impact will Tech Hollywood continue to have on the production of films and shows? On the future of art and entertainment?

Algorithm and AI Transforms Entertainment

Hollywood studios hired humans in the 20th century to evaluate their new releases. They used “Previews” to keep scenes that earned paid audience approval during the first cut screening and eliminate those that did not.

With tech companies running what’s left of Hollywood, artificial intelligence and algorithms may dictate the shape of films and TV shows. Warner Bros. signed a deal with Cinelytic to use AI to decide which movies to commission and determine the profitability of actors in specific territories. In 2016, tech company AT&T shelled out $85 billion to acquire Warner Bros. Other studios soon rode the AI wave resulting in a mass strike of actors and writers who insisted upon improved pay and recognition.

The streaming Golden Age is coming to an end with minor services and major film studios from the 20th century giving way to digital entertainment. Meanwhile, Netflix determines the future of its shows with an opaque algorithm that has caused a disproportionate cancellation of series made by women. This backfired when many accepted shows did not reach their second season, calling into question whether AI should be the judge.

Now, tech companies that own streaming services are demolishing 75-day exclusive theatrical windows, making it easier for people to watch films right from their homes. The effect is crushing in-person theaters, which have not financially recovered from their drop in viewership owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps the US Justice Department’s antitrust laws were justified–twice against Hollywood studios. The first time, the 1948 Hollywood Antitrust Case tried to reign in Hollywood’s intimidating behavior. The second time, the US Justice Department implemented the financial syndication and interest rules that regulated ABC, NBC and CBS shows in primetime in the 1970s with the intent of encouraging independent production companies.

This century, though, a much more dangerous kind of oligopoly is being formed. The giant conglomerates Apple, Amazon and AT&T are sucking what’s left of film studios and using algorithms and AI to maximize profits and minimize costs. The 2023 strike in Los Angeles was not enough for another major Justice intervention in the US. So, until that happens, let us see the next meals tech companies will devour in Los Angeles while Tech Hollywood becomes a game with many fewer players than in old times.

[Gwyneth Campbell edited the piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Tech Goes Mainstream, Shattering the Old Movie Industry appeared first on Fair Observer.

It’s a tricky question since the Third Reich is probably the highest expression of hard power in human history. Hard power consists in financial or social coercion and, above all, military power. Soft power, on the other hand, is usually felt through diplomacy, science, sports and, most effectively, arts and entertainment. 

Hollywood turned the Nazi regime into a soft power asset for the United States throughout movie history, showing the moral, intellectual and martial superiority of the Allies in films like Casablanca (1942), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), From Here to Eternity (1953), Patton (1970), Schindler’s List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). All of these got took the most important Academy Awards; the Oscars, indeed, are the final coronation of Hollywood’s soft power.

The UK also used the victory against the Nazis as a soft power asset in films like in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and The English Patient (1996). Russia, likewise, has its World War II films, such as Only “Old Men” Are Going Into Battle (1973), They Fought for Their Country (1975) and Stalingrad (2013). Coincidently or not, since Russia became the West’s political enemy during the Cold War, none of them got any significant awards in major festivals.

Turning other nation’s hard power into our own soft power is an old strategy of Hollywood, sometimes with direct help from the seat of hard power, Washington itself—like when US President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered movies to be made to engage citizens in the American cause, like Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (1942) and Walt Disney’s creation of characters like Zé Carioca for movies like Saludos Amigos (1942) as a conscious effort to keep Latin America close to the US during the war and supplying foods and commodities for the allied soldiers.

All Quiet on the Western Front

This year, however, a German movie made Oscar history and won four awards, including Best Picture, by showing World War I from Germany’s point of view. All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), Edward Berger’s adaptation of the 1929 novel by Erich Maria Remarque, is a war spectacle that trails Paul Bäumer, played by Felix Kammerer.

Bäumer is a frightened soldier during most of its 150 minutes, as Germany and France negotiate a ceasefire. Ceaseless scenes of brutality, shot in a widened scope, and powerful images closely follow Bäumer, deepening his human character, an essential cinematic tool to keep the viewers intimate and close to the protagonist, even if not because of his cause. The adaptation’s greatest quality lies exactly here: its ability to avoid stereotyping, something that Hollywood done has many times with Nazi Germans, Viet Cong, Soviets and so on. In contrast, Paul Bäumer is shown with his fears, desires, human mercy and naivety, through which we instantly connect with him. 

World War I, however, is not a big “cinematic taboo” for Germans like World War II—the greatest human tragedy of modern times or maybe of all times, responsible for the deaths of 35 to 60 million people or even more. With the help of Hollywood’s soft power, the Third Reich became solidly portrayed as the greatest enemy of human history. So, again, the question: can World War II, the Nazi regime, become a soft power asset through cinema for Germany?

Are we ready for a new look at WWII?

It’s probably impossible to imagine modern democratic societies accepting any German movies that simply show a sympathetic German point of view about World War II, no matter how good the movie is. It is hard to believe that any film could repeat the feat of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), which is considered one of the greatest documentaries ever made, studied in all film schools around the world because of the director’s use of techniques such as aerial photography, long-focus lenses, moving cameras, distorted perspective and music. Even despite its fame, none of the several awards the film won in Germany, France and Italy are today listed by major websites like IMDb, except for “Best Foreign Documentary” in the Venice Film Festival held during Mussolini’s dictatorship. 

German filmmakers and production companies have long circumvented this taboo with the same strategy Berger used in All Quiet on the Western Front: a script that relies on character density and preferably puts the conflict as a half-distant background. The Tin Drum (1979), directed by Volker Schlöndorff, accompanies Oskar Matzerath (David Bennent), who falls down the stairs at the age of three and stops growing up. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film by leaving the horror of the war distant and caricatural. Two years later, the German director Wolfgang Petersen got six Academy Awards nominations for his Das Boot (1981), an achievement only made possible because the movie portrays the horrors of the Nazi regime inside the claustrophobic submarine in the same way Hollywood had portrayed it for decades.

Recently, though, German movies that portray the Nazi regime with a closer and less stereotypical look from Germans themselves are getting recognition from relevant festivals around the world. Before the Fall (2004) directed by Dennis Gansel, takes a close look at the war while showing the boxing abilities of Friedrich Weimer (Max Riemelt), whose athletic skills take him to an elite Nazi high school in 1942. He applies, against his father’s wishes, to pursue a better future. 

More recently, Robert Schwentke’s The Captain (2017) follows the last days of World War II with a young German soldier, fighting for survival, who finds a Nazi captain uniform and assumes his identity. To escape the Nazis’ monstrousness, he becomes, himself, a monster. The movie won 23 international awards in festivals like the European Film Awards and the San Sebastián International Film Festival. 

The Academy Awards, considered the most important film festival in the world, still have not shared their soft power with German filmmakers who portray the Nazi regime with a less stereotypical look. But the success of All Quiet on the Western Front in the last iteration of the Academy Awards shows that even the most horrifying episodes of the human race may become a soft power asset to a nation that carried it out if filmmakers manage to depict human goodness, mercy and hope among evil and chaos.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Is the World Ready for German WWII Movies? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Africa, the birthplace of mankind, is home to millions of ancient artifacts admired by the whole planet and coveted by museums and private collectors all around the world. But Africa itself rarely profits from the source of its own soft power. For centuries, its art has been stolen and sold abroad, leaving African museums and galleries with very few—sometimes none—of the essential elements of soft power to seduce other nations.

However,  a growing movement is reversing centuries-long,steady, outward flow of ancient African art towards other horizons. Last January, an ancient wooden sarcophagus, displayed at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, was returned to Egypt after US specialists determined it had been looted years ago. This is just one of the 5300 stolen artifacts that were retuned to Cairo since 2021. A “Head of a King” or “Oba” dated from 1700 was part of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum collection for more than 70 years and it was returned to Nigeria, along with 31 other cultural artifacts. Also in the US, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art returned 29 Benin bronzes to Nigeria in late October, stolen in a British raid in 1897.

Last November, the Horniman Museum in London returned six artifacts looted by British troops 125 years ago from a place in Benin, now Nigeria. Of these six, two were 16^th century bronze plaques ransacked from the royal palace in 1897, when British forces sacked and burned the kingdom. The return put pressure on the British Museum to return over 900 objects, the largest collection of ancient African art in the world. The British Museum argues that the British Museum Act of 1963 and the Heritage Act of 1983 prevent it from returning the artifacts . 

In contrast, Germany signed an agreement with Nigeria in 2022 to return 1,100 metal plaques and sculptures from the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin, mostly taken by British forces and sold to 20 museums around Germany. The country will also return a female figure known as Ngonnso to the kingdom of Nso, in northwestern Cameroon. A colonial officer took it and donated it to Berlin’s Ethnological Museum in 1903. The figure’s presence in Berlin provoked  a civic initiative called “Bring Back Ngonnso,” with locals claiming that they have suffered multiple misfortunes since the statue was brought to their city. 

The Fight For Ownership of African Art

Do national laws prevent countries from returning artifacts to their homeland? Probably not. Tourists and international communities are increasingly rejecting the idea that museums in developed countries should still be allowed to profit from other peoples’ and other nations’ ancient art. In fact, the longer those museums keep these artifacts, the less they become attractive as a soft power tool. Instead of seducing visitors, they may even drive them away. 

Some accounts say that over half a million cultural artifacts originated in Africa are located in Europe. Countries like Belgium must now review all colonial-era acquisitions from the Democratic Republic of Congo. But as Bénédicte Savoy argues in her book, Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat, the movement began in the 1960s, when many African nations declared independence. It faded in the 1980s when European museums ignored these demands. Appeals by the likes of Ahmadou-Mahtar M’Bow, the then director-general of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), had no effect. In 1978, the UNESCO boss said that “everything which has been taken away (…) bore witness to a history of a culture and of a nation whose spirit they perpetuated and renewed.”

The resistance to the return of ancient art to Africa may cause damage beyond the walls of European museums. In her book, Savoy reminds readers that some European countries were receptive to the idea of restitution during the Cold War. They wanted to use both  hard power and soft power to improve relations with African countries. Returning art was a good way to increase the latter.

In the 21st century, those efforts may be needed more than ever. Europe and the US have been trying to strengthen commercial and political ties with Africa in an effort to counter the increasing influence of China. In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron announced the return of 26 pieces, including sculptures and other artifacts, to the Republic of Benin. This West African nation had formerly been a colony of France. Later, the French press argued that this gesture may not be enough. It expressed the current public opinion that France should return other artifacts to Africa, including priceless antiques from venerated museums like the Louvre. 

Art Coming Home

Are there any arguments that justify European museums not returning Africa’s ancient art? One argument maintains that this would lead to a loss of cultural heritage. Museums would have poorer collections, making it more difficult for people to get cultural exposure and education. Another argument holds that European museums are safer places for ancient artifacts than unstable African countries. Many of these countries do not have proper storage conditions for artifacts. Many Africans find this argument ridiculous. Nigerian art historian, Chika Okeke-Agulu said that it reminds him of a “thief demanding the construction of a secure facility before returning a stolen BMW.”  

The arguments for returning ancient African art are not just rhetorical. First, new museums have been constructed in Africa. They highlight the African drive to bring their artifacts home. These African nations also want to increase their soft power, attract more tourists and earn revenues. After a series of delays, Egypt will finally inaugurate the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo. This museum will cover 50 hectares and house over 100,000 objects, including artifacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb. 

Second, returned artifacts increase a nation’s self-esteem. When France returned the Dahomey statues to Benin, a parade attracted thousands to see the sculptures at a free exhibition installed at the presidential palace in Cotonou. These celebrations and the display of cultural artifacts in the land of their origins boost national pride, identity and confidence.

Finally and importantly, returned artifacts stimulate investment in a nation’s cultural life. Benin City in Nigeria is building a new museum complex to display the repatriated art from the West.  The museum’s promoters hope that this new museum will make Benin City a global destination. New hotels and businesses to serve tourists will create jobs and stimulate the local economy.

If this movement continues, we may  see priceless works of art return home. The Nefertiti Bust (1345 BC) in Neues Museum in Berlin, the Rosetta Stone (196 BC) in the British Museum and many others might soon return to Africa. Of course, there is a chance this might never happen. We can’t know the future yet. However, the time for Africa’s ancient art to return to its homeland, increase the continent’s soft power and stimulate its economy has arrived.
[This piece was edited by Bella Bible.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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The stories behind this special reunion are as touching as the performance presented at René and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. Xander Parish is a British dancer responsible for the choreography. A year ago he married a fellow dancer, Anastasia Demidova. Together they made the decision to leave everything behind without saying anything to their friends in the Mariinsky. “If I had stayed in the Mariinsky Ballet, it would mean things were fine but they weren’t, even if I love my mentors and colleagues there. It’s sad when politics has that kind of effect on art”, says Xander. “It was very hard for every dancer. We are all against the war, but at the same time, we are all grateful to Russia for all it taught us in arts. But it was scary to leave by bus across Finland and Estonia, when airplanes prices charged by Turkish airlines were an extorsion” Parish explained.

Texas-born Adrian Blake Mitchell went on to dance six seasons atthe Mikhailovsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, together with the world-famous ballerina Polina Semionova. When the Russian invasion of Ukraine took place, flights were canceled and Mitchell found that it was impossible to cross borders with his small dog, Beau, either by train or bus. He took an Uber-like service to cross the Bridge of Friendship, as the border from Russia to Estonia is familiarly referred to. But the FSB agents (Russian security) realized he was American and asked him about his politics, his thoughts on Russia, where he worked and the countries he had traveled too. He broke out in tears when he finally managed to get to the other side of the bridge.

Russian Ballet’s Soft Power: Will Dance Outlast Autocracy?

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Ukrainian dancer Vsevolod Maevsky, formerly with the Mariinsky Ballet, says he has lost all emotional balance in the present and no plans for the future. “All I want is that my sister and nephew, who decided to stay in Kiev because she didn’t find any jobs elsewhere, may survive, although I get very angry that she didn’t listen to me when I advised her to leave. I feel a  lot of contradictory emotion now. I think politics is all about nothing but the money. They don’t care about people. How can we build a new world if we put money and nationalities abovepeople?”Maevsky complained.

Swiss-born Laura Fernandez Gromova is Ukrainian on her mother’s side. Before joining the Mariinsky, she won three top prizes at the Prix de Lausanne ballet competition. She was in Moscow when the war started, but part of her family is in Mariupol, which suffered some of the deadliest bombardment. She still wonders if they are alive. She was advised not to show her Ukrainian passport. After leaving Russia, she thought her career might be over, until she received an invitation to dance at the Georgian National Company.

War’s heartbreak and the humanity of the arts

David Motta Soares left Brazil at the age of 12 to join the Bolshoi Ballet Academy. Living in Russia since that age, he says the decision to leave Russia was one of the hardest in his life, especially after European dance companies started to ban Russian dancers. “That’s sad and impossible. Every major dance company in the world has some Russian artists. Also, we don’t do politics. We bring people joy and happiness. We need to embrace, not exclude people,” says David, who booked an urgent flight to Turkey after the invasion and wrote on his Instagram account, a few days later, that he had quit the Bolshoi, “the place I called home for many years”. He describes the reunion with other dancers in Costa Mesa. “It was a fairytale to meet my colleagues in California and bring some joy in such a difficult moment. Art and sports have that responsibility, to put forward the human side of this war,” says the dancer, who is now in Germany, but with no long-term plans for the future.

The idea for Reunited in Dance was born a few months after the invasion of Ukraine and it was sponsored by Elizabeth Segerstrom and the Henry T. and Elizabeth Segerstrom Foundation. It premiered The Ballet Class, a new ballet choreographed by Xander Parish to Tchaikovsky’s The Children’s Album. The program included Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain, Eric Gauthier’s Ballet 101, and Ilya Jivoy’s BA//CH, closing with selections of Swan Lake, Le Corsaire, Paquita, Paquita, Don Quixote and others.Although Reunited in Dance was designed to be a one-night celebration, dancers were so excited with the project and happy with the long and warm applause of the audience that some of them have plans to join again soon. Parish, for instance, is thinking about forming a ballet company that embraces talents in exile. He explained why. “I believe that the spirit of that place, what we know, what we learned, who we became and who we are, can be preserved, and can be reunited.”,

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Now, Israel’s most recent soft power tool is audiovisual culture, especially TV shows. The main goal may not be peace or just profits to the country’s production companies. Over the long term, those productions are made to seduce the hearts and minds of the worldwide population that watches these shows in streaming services, creating a positive perception of  Israeli narratives concerning several issues shown in the series.

The most important ingredients to make a nation’s audiovisual products a tool of a soft power exist in abundance in Israel today. There’s enough money and international co-production agreements to make good-quality TV shows, full of special effects, different locations and talented screenwriters, directors and stars. There are enough interesting real stories happening every day in the region, inspiring writers to deliver products about religion, politics, sex, culture, corruption, violence, prejudice, social injustices and more. And the most important ingredient: Israel is a democracy with freedom of speech, an essential tool for touching sore spots concerning their own failures and regrets and favoring the production of compelling audiovisual art and entertainment.

The story of Israeli TV success

The kickoff of the Israeli audiovisual boom was the HBO psychotherapy drama BeTipul (2005-2008), that generated the HBO adaptation ‘In Treatment’ (2008), winner of two Primetime Emmys. Gideon Raff’s Prisoners of War (2009-2012) was adapted in Hollywood as ‘Homeland’ (2011-2020), winning eight Primetime Emmys. But Hollywood’s adapting and winning more awards than the original stories is just the tip of the iceberg. The new trend of Israeli audiovisual culture’s soft power are TV shows spoken in Hebrew and Arabic, shot in the Middle East and distributed all over the world by streaming giants like Nefflix, HBO Max and AppleTV+. Success of the original productions internationally and in festivals facilitates shaping the world’s preferences toward narratives in which Israel controls the content, the moral of the stories and, of course, the profits.

The first non-English TV show on AppleTV+ — the International Award Emmy winner Tehran’(2021)  — is spoken in Hebrew and Arabic. It is considered the new Homeland among TV shows, with the special participation of Hollywood star Glenn Close. After an explosive Season 2 finale late last June, fans are demanding its renewal for Season 3. The story follows a Mossad agent in her first mission as a hacker in Tehran.

With lots of political critique among the amazing scenes of car chases, explosions and betrayals, the show also emphasizes a “fictional” underground life in Iran, where women drink, have uninhibited sex and young people, including the son of the most powerful general of Iran, party with drugs and alcohol.

Ori Elon’s show ‘Shtisel’ (2013-2021) became an international hit on Netflix using a different strategy designed to strengthen Israel’s cultural soft power. Its brilliant screenplaytries to demystify religious orthodoxy by following the lives of Shulem Shtisel (Doval’e Glickman), a teacher, and his son Akiva (Michael Aloni), who discuss moral issues such as arranged marriage, pride, feminism and religion. With its style that combines the influence of This is Us and Downton Abbey’, ‘Shtisel’ generated so many debates over the internet about fundamentalism – not only Jewish, but also Christian and Islamic – that Marta Kauffman, co-creator of Friends and Grace and Frankie, is now developing the American version for Amazon Prime.

Just like Hollywood, Israel’s new boom of TV shows don’t target only on Israeli cultural specificities. They seek to conquer the world thanks to stories with universal themes. One such is the psychological thriller Losing Alice (2021), premiered by Israeli channel Hot 3 in June 2020 and internationally on Apple TV+ in January 2021. The series follows a frustrated film director, Alice, mother of three daughters, and tracks her obsession with Sophie, a young screenwriter. Alice is played by Israeli star Ayelet Zurer, known for Angels & Demons and Munich.

The Israeli TV drama The Lesson competed in the 2022 edition of the prestigious TV Series Festival in Berlin and won two awards in the Canneseries Longform Competition. Co-starring Doron Ben David (Fauda), it tells the story of a high school teacher and the conflict with his students over racism following a social media post. 

Soft power collateral damages

Controlling the narrative means owning the morals of the stories. But even if talented screenwriters try to make it as realistic as possible, collateral damage is almost certain. TV shows that are mega-hits like Netflix’s The Spy (2019), Fauda (2015) and Hit & Run (2021) show ordinary Israelis recruited by Mossad or the Israeli Air Force, who become effective agents in infiltrating and capturing even the most difficult enemies, a clear message celebrating Israel’s invincible secret service and its technologies. HBO’s Valley of Tears (2020) goes further by turning the arrogance of the Israeli army in the initial moments of the Yom Kippur War into an overall lesson in overcoming adversity.

Another type of collateral damage to soft power occurs when its own citizens reject the show’s perspectives. The HBO-Keshet co-production Our Boys (2019) was called “anti-Semitic” by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who urged a boycott of the production. The show emphasized the death of a Palestinian boy rather than the Israeli victims whose death led to the Gaza conflict in 2014. The producers tried to show the violence caused by three ultra-orthodox Jews from the perspective of the Palestinian boy’s family, but part of the Jewish audience in Israel and around the globe complainedthat the series left the deaths caused by Hamas in background.

Last but not the least, the collateral damage to soft power is competition. Everyone wants to claim a slice of the result of cultural increased soft power influence over the global population. Producing a full season of a TV show is usually more expensive than producing a film., Palestine is thus getting help from streaming services like Netflix to tell their stories told in movies. Palestinian Stories, released last October by the streaming giant, is a collection of 32 award-wining films either directed by Palestinian filmmakers or recounting Palestinian stories. Most of them are about the life of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, both occupied by Israel since 1967. But there’s also one TV show that aims at competing with Israeli narratives. After watching Fauda, Palestinian director Mohammed Soraya is making his own version of the conflicts in a Gaza TV studio. 
Qabdat Al-Ahrar (Fist of the Free) will revisit the 2018 Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip that resulted in the deaths of seven Hamas fighters and an Israeli officer. It is a modest,low-budget production with poor salaries for artists and crew. That helps to account for even the biggest problem of the Hamas TV series: Its lack of realism.: Local actors play Israelis and say they are exposed to real-world hostility. Israeli characters speak only in Arabic and, at the request of the Hamas mufti, women wear headscarves even if they are portraying Jewish characters. The perfect ingredients to turn Qabdat Al-Ahrar into a propaganda preaching to their own choir and not a soft power instrument to the world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Netflix’s first original film in Arabic, Perfect Strangers, has become more of a controversy than a hit in regions like Egypt and the Middle East. This is due to its featuring a character that comes out as gay to his friends as they dine together. Although the movie doesn’t show any explicitly homosexual scenes, it has provoked strong reactions against the streaming giant, as some citizens said the movie promotes homosexuality and immorality.

Released last January in 190 countries, Perfect Strangers, set in Beirut, is directed by Lebanese Wissam Smayra and stars actors such as Egypt’s Mona Zaki, Lebanon’s Nadine Labaki and Jordan’s Eyad Nassar. It’s the story of seven close friends who decide to play a game of “true or false” around the dinner table, exposing the intimate secrets that can be found on their cell phones. The friends agree to show every call, text and voice message to one another. The narrative reveals the occasional betrayal among some of the couples, and, at a critical point, one message has the effect of outing one of the friends as gay.

If it wasn’t for the Arabic language spoken by the actors and some Arab food served at dinner, ‘Perfect Strangers’ would look like a Hollywood movie. The plot, with its twists and turns and the dialogue, follows the classic model that the US studios have used for decades. The cinematography and art direction evoke the studio productions shot in L.A. in the 1950s. The characters are all good-looking and embrace modern western “values.” The women drink, are sexually nonchalant (one even takes off her underwear under the table) and are not shy about  revealing their infidelity. While the men check for porn on the internet and talk about money and profit.

With all these Hollywood stereotypes, one might think that the film could harness some of the soft power of the American film industry and seduce Arab viewers with a piece of entertainment of the kind that has charmed audiences even in China and Russia, places where homosexuality is also a taboo. The soft power of Hollywood films, playing on its ability to seduce rather than coerce, has opened many doors for the United States in the world. For instance, in the 20^th century, Hollywood served as a tool convincing neutral countries to support US foreign policy against the Soviet Union. 

In the 21^st century, during a political and diplomatic crisis between Iran and the US, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose the then First Lady Michelle Obama to reveal the winner of Best Picture of 2013, Argo, Ben Affleck’s movie about six Americans who escape the 1979 Embassy takeover. Because the movie had an enormous appeal to Middle East audiences, the Iranian military commander sought to congratulate Mrs. Obama for revealing the “real nature” of the award, based on political, not artistic criteria. In other words, Iranians realized how the most famous cinema award was used as a soft power tool by the US government.

Perfect Strangers may be less seductive and displays poorer production values than ‘Argo’. But in Arab countries, it’s far more controversial, if only because it evokes cultural taboos that may be too strong to break even by Hollywood’s tried and tested soft power prowess. When I watched the movie, I immediately questioned some gay friends living in countries like Egypt, Turkey, and Lebanon. Some of them have spent years in very secret homosexual relations with other men and women. What I’ve heard from them is that the Netflix production caused more pain than relief, since they had to act as if they were as ashamed and offended as their furious relatives with the availability of the movie in their culture. It’s a well-known fact that homosexuality is so strong a taboo that their families haven’t a clue about their son’s and daughter’s sexual orientation. This means they feel very comfortable freely attacking it and accusing the Western world of exporting cultural products that “stimulate those behaviors.”

For decades, Hollywood productions have been successful in Arab countries, but most of the time, the key to success was their ability to adapt the content and dub it into languages like Farsi, to insert local jokes and avoid cultural taboos. But Netflix’s strategy was risky and clever at the same time. Its first Arab movie was a co-production by Dubai-based Front Row Filmed Entertainment, Egypt’s Film Clinic and Lebanon’s Empire Entertainment. Shot in Lebanon with Arab actors, it didn’t go through local censors and was labeled as a non-family audience film only for the region. 

Thanks to this strategy, it was screened in many countries in the region, unlike Marvel’s ‘Eternals’ and Steven Spielberg’s ‘West Side Story’, banned respectively for having the first gay superhero and, the second, for having a transgender character. And despite (or because of) the controversy, Perfect Strangers has risen to the top of the Netflix ratings for number of views in the Middle East, with a famous Egyptian actress like Elham Shahin going public to defend the movie, saying “there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it”, while Mostafa Bakry, a member of Egypt’s House of Representatives, asserted that Netflix should be banned from Egypt. But the controversy itself might have paid handsome dividends, since the movie sat at the top of the region’s streaming chart for February. Here’s yet another consequence of Netflix’s strategy in the region. According to the Egyptian film critic and programmer, Joseph Fahim, no other entertainment conglomerate has ever shaken upsocial politics and posed such a threat to patriarchy, though it must be said that artistic freedom – another conquest attributable to Hollywood’s soft power – is still far from being a reality in the Arab world.

This isn’t the first time that cinema has been used in Egypt as a soft power to seduce the public to accept more liberal and modern values. With a more discreet and subtly artistic attempt, award-winning Egyptian director Youssef Chahine has in the past circumvented government censorship with films exploiting the themes of sex, homosexuality, drugs and political criticism. In movies like Return of the Prodigal Son (1978) and Alexandria: Again and Forever (1989), women with masculine traits and men with mortal hatred of their own repressed desires were ways the director found to evoke homosexuality. The filmmaker, who won awards in western festivals such as Cannes and Berlin with his art films designed for smaller audiences, attempted to undermine antigay culture in his country but proved unsuccessful. Perhaps this time, decades later and with a much bigger budget, Netflix can achieve a better result in the quest to make other people’s sexuality a perfectly acceptable characteristic among imperfect strangers.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Now, with the war in Ukraine, that soft power is facing a major crisis. Since Russia launched its invasion at the end of February, many ballet performances are being canceled around the world: The Bolshoi Ballet’s summer season at London’s Royal Opera House, “Swan Lake” by the Royal Moscow Ballet at the Helix Theatre in Dublin and concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic — led by the Russian conductor and Vladimir Putin’s supporter, Valery Gergiev — at the Carnegie Hall in New York have all been called off. 

The Danish minister of culture, Ane Halsboe-Jorgensen, suggested the Musikhuset Aarhus, Scandinavia’s largest concert hall, should cancel Russian National Ballet’s performance. The UK tour by the Russian State Ballet of Siberia has been interrupted as a stand against the war. 

Because of the conflict, former dancers and Ukraine natives Darya Fedotova and Sergiy Mykhaylov changed the name of their school from the School of Russian Ballet to the International Ballet of Florida. Tyneside Cinema, in Newcastle, canceled the screenings of Bolshoi Ballet’s “Swan Lake” and “Pharaoh’s Daughter.” A Japanese ballerina with the Russian Ballet Theater in Moscow, Masayo Kondo, is dancing for peace during a tour in the US, but a restaurant refused to serve lunch to the cast when they learned they were from Russia. 

Business Card

The boycotts may just be starting, bringing financial loss to Russia’s cultural establishment amid already crippling economic sanctions. But the damage to Russian ballet’s soft power can be even more everlasting, taking years to recover. After all, soft power is the ability to seduce rather than coerce, strengthen a nation’s image abroad and thus enhance cultural and diplomatic relations as well as tourism. It takes years, even decades, to cultivate the tradition, like Hollywood in the US, the carnival in Brazil and MAG (manga, anime, games) culture in Japan.

Both the USSR and Russia could never compete with truly global pop-culture exports emanating from America. There were no music icons to rival Michael Jackson, blockbusters like “Star Wars” or TV stars like Oprah. The country produced incredible cultural products, especially when it came to film. Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi “Solaris” (1972) and Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Arc” (2002) are masterpieces that earned Russian cinema a place in every art book and class around the world, but they were far from being international hits. 

Russian composers like Igor Stravinski and Alexander Scriabin, and writers such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Lev Tolstoy, similarly occupy high positions in the world’s literary and music canons but can hardly be described as widely popular, especially in the Anglophone cultural sphere. 

Ballet, on the other hand, has always been a lucrative export for Russia. In her book “Swans of the Kremlin,” Christina Ezrahi looks at how Russian ballet, whose tradition stretches back to the imperial court as a celebration of the Romanov dynasty, with ballet schools established during the rule of Empress Anna Ioannovna in the 18^th century, has grabbed the world’s attention. Following the 1917 revolution, Anatoly Lunacharsky luckily convinced Vladimir Lenin not to destroy the Bolshoi because peasants and workers flocked to the theater despite the chaos of the civil war years. 

Art and Politics

Although theaters like the Bolshoi may appear as a microcosmos of liberal art, in Russia’s history, ballet has always had close ties with political power. Stalin was an opera aficionado and used to arrive at the Bolshoi by a secret entrance and watch alone. After the signing of the non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939, he took Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to see Galina Ulanova dance at the Bolshoi. 

During the Soviet era, ballet served as a visiting card for Russian diplomats. In “American-Soviet Cultural Diplomacy,” Cadra Peterson McDaniel demonstrates how the Kremlin used the Bolshoi ballets as a means of cultural exchange, weaving communist ideas such as collective ownership of the means of production and the elimination of income inequality discretely into the storylines along with pre-revolutionary dance aesthetics during 1959 US tour.

Other artists were also crucial for projecting Soviet cultural soft power at the time, like the world-famous cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya. But they faced tough competition from Tchaikovsky’s ballet hits like “The Nutcracker.” 

Ballet served a purpose during the putsch of 1991, which signaled the beginning of the Soviet Union’s collapse, when instead of announcing the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, “Swan Lake” was broadcast on national television on a loop. The export of Russian ballet increased during the Yeltsin years as the Bolshoi had to tour to compensate for an unstable economy while enjoying the opening up of the country after decades behind the Iron Curtain. 

President Putin’s two decades in power may have allowed for economic recovery, but Russian ballet suffered from scandals like the acid attack on Bolshoi’s artistic director Sergei Filin in 2013. The scandal garnered the attention of the international media following stories about the toxic culture at the Bolshoi and its close affiliation with the Kremlin, tarnishing Russian ballet’s appeal.

The connection between Bolshoi and the power structure in Russia is so vivid that artists were directly affected as the result of the invasion of Ukraine. Tugan Sokhiev, the chief conductor at the Bolshoi, resigned after coming under pressure to condemn Russian actions. Fearing that musicians are becoming “victims of so-called ‘cancel culture,’” he worried he “will be soon asked to choose between Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy.” Two Bolshoi dancers, Brazilian David Motta Soares and Italian Jacopo Tissi, also resigned, citing solidarity with Ukraine. 

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As someone who appears to favor the outdoors, sports and guns, it’s unlikely that President Putin will see ballet as a priority to be shielded from Western sanctions and boycotts. There is, in fact, little he could do, especially given the current restrictions on travel in and out of the country. There is, of course, the question of whether boycotts of the arts are justified, considering that other countries have a history of political intervention, like China in Hong Kong or the US in Iraq, but their cultural products were not banned from movie theaters and art exhibitions. 

It may find itself caught in another historic moment, but Russian ballet’s cultural soft power survived the tsars, revolutions, famine, dictatorship and the fall of empires. In the end, dance will likely outlast autocracy.  

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Russian Ballet Under Fire — Can the Industry Dance Out of This One? appeared first on Fair Observer.

But first, another question: What is France’s greatest contribution to the world? Is it cinema? Auguste and Louis Lumière are considered to be the founding fathers of cinema, their cinématographe bringing film to the wider public for the first time on December 28, 1895. In 2020, French films nearly doubled their local market share, with French movie theaters outperforming most other European countries despite a steep drop in admissions.

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However, this seemed to coincide with a drop in US productions coming to market, suggesting that French cinema still can’t compete with the soft power projected by Hollywood, enjoying considerably lower global circulation in commercial theaters.

Is it French cuisine, perhaps? Still no. An international study of more than 25,000 people across 24 countries elected pizza and pasta as the world’s most popular foods. French cuisine doesn’t even win a silver or bronze medal. Italy is followed by China and then Japan when it comes to culinary preferences.

Fashion is definitely France’s greatest cultural soft power, with couture houses of Hubert de Givenchy, Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Yves Saint Laurent and many others being responsible for €150 billion ($175) in direct turnover, including €33 billion in exports, generating 1 million jobs and 2.7% of the country’s GDP in 2016.

One fashion product that symbolizes all that soft power turned 100 this year: Chanel Nº5. Conceived in 1921 by the legendary Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who wanted to create “a woman’s perfume with a woman’s scent,” Chanel Nº5 became the top-selling luxury fragrance in the world. Coco Chanel worked with Ernest Beaux, a Russian perfumer, who presented her with five samples. It was the fifth lucky bottle that gave birth to the now-iconic name.

The popularity of the fragrance lasted through the two world wars, the hippie and feminism movements, and reached the 21^st century as a symbol of high luxury, a touch of soft power that has graced the necks and wrists of women all over the planet. It’s a rare occurrence that a product, which is associated with wealth and status, still sells at a rate of a bottle every 30 seconds around the globe. That’s half a million bottles at the price of $100 million every year.

But soft power is not only about money and sales. It’s about winning the hearts and minds. Maybe that’s why Chanel Nº 5 symbolizes French soft power so perfectly. When Hollywood’s most emblematic actress, Marilyn Monroe, was asked what she wears to bed, her reply was, “Just a few drops of Nº5.”

Avantgarde movements like surrealism, dadaism and minimalism of the 1920s may have inspired the famous design of the bottle, which was included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959. The bottle fired up the imagination of pop-art star Andy Warhol, who immortalized Chanel Nº5 in four different versions of his “Ads: Chanel” from 1985.

The perfume certainly helped immortalize the name of its creator. In 2009, two big productions told her story: “Coco Before Chanel,” staring Audrey Tautou, was nominated for an Oscar for costume design, and “Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky,” staring Anna Mouglalis, told the story of the creation of the perfume during a passionate love affair between two creative giants of the 20^th century.

The soft power of the Chanel Nº5 brand is so efficient that it eclipsed even some dark moments of its creator’s life, like Coco Chanel’s alleged anti-Semitism and homophobia, or her relationship with Nazi officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage during the World War II. In “Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War,” Hal Vaughan suggests that she also collaborated with the Nazi regime during the occupation of France. Ironically, after the liberation of Paris by the Allies in 1944, American GIs lined up at Chanel’s Rue Cambon boutique to buy the famous perfume for their loved ones.

Over the decades, the soft power of Chanel Nº5 was reinforced by its ambassadors in its ad campaigns: Catherine Deneuve, Ali MacGraw, Audrey Tautou and Gisele Bundchen, among others. Today’s ambassador, Marion Cotillard, is an Academy Award winner for her role as another French icon, Edith Piaf. In 2004, Chanel spent $33 million — 300,000 bottles worth — on an ad directed by Baz Luhrmann starring Nicole Kidman. Chanel could easily afford this splurge: The company is worth $ 12.8 billion, number 52 on the Forbes list of most valuable brands in the world.

To celebrate the perfume’s centenary, Chanel created a diamond necklace that reflects the characteristics of the bottle. More than 700 diamonds were used to make the jewel, surrounding a 55,55 carat D Flawless diamond, reflecting its magic number. Few other products are as lasting, luxurious and seductive as Chanel Nº5, exuding soft power with every fragrant drop.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Is Chanel Nº5 France’s Greatest Cultural Export? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics were a soft-power victory for China, a momentous event that pushed to the sidelines controversies like Tibetan freedom activists protesting along the Olympic torch relay. The 2016 Rio Olympics attracted 1.17 million tourists who enjoyed the games at one of the world’s most famous beaches while Brazilians were protesting against economic corruption involving state oil company Petrobras and the political scandals that led to the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff.

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In 1964, Tokyo became the first Asian city to host the Summer Olympics. The 2020 games, however, face an invisible challenge to turning the event into a soft-power coup for Japan. With the COVID-19 pandemic showing no sign of subsiding, hundreds took to the streets of Tokyo to protest against holding the event. “Cancel the Olympics,” they demanded, fearing that there are many variants of the coronavirus circulating in the capital, with 90% of the citizens concerned that athletes might bring more infection into the country.

Tokyo’s games are already considered the most expensive Summer Olympics in history, with a price tag of at least $25 billion. The 2019 Rugby World Cup brought a 29,4% increase in the number of tourists coming to Japan, and the country is expected to achieve a record 40 million in 2020. As a result of the pandemic, the games were postponed to 2021 and will go ahead amid a state of emergency in Tokyo. This means that events in the capital will run without spectators, while some venues around the country will be allowed to operate at 50% capacity. The exclusion of foreign fans could mean a loss of 200 billion yen ($1.8 billion). 

If Not Sport, Then Culture

If the organizers manage to steer the games through without major incident and prevent the spread of COVID-19, the Tokyo Olympics will, without doubt, bring with them a soft-power legacy, although with inevitable economic loss. But Japan’s main source of soft power is its culture, bringing billions in profits. Especially prominent is MAG culture — manga, anime and games. These are an essential tool of what is called “Cool Japan,” a campaign launched by the Japanese government in 2010 to promote its cultural industry around the world. This soft-power strategy went global and got the attention of Western media when revenues from sales and royalties of Japanese cultural products soared to $12.5 billion in 2002, a 300% increase from 1992.

MAG culture is so important for Japan’s image and budget that during the Rio Olympics, when the key to the next games was passed on to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, he surprised the world by popping out of a green drainpipe dressed as Super Mario, accompanied by a video showing athletes dressed like Hello Kitty and Doraemon. The stunt made the usually-somber politician the top trend on Twitter the next day. Years earlier, Hello Kitty was appointed Japan tourism ambassador in places like China and Hong Kong due to the popularity of the character in countries that suffered Japanese aggression at the end of the 19^th century and during the Second World War.

Manga became one of Japan’s most important exports and an important gateway into Japanese culture, getting major exhibitions in places like the British Museum in London. According to a survey conducted in four European countries, the majority of readers discover manga while still at school, a time particularly important for shaping our identity and perceptions of other cultures. Japanese anime industry pulled a record of $17.7 billion in 2017, with the help of artists like Hayao Miyazaki, who won an Oscar in 2001 for “Spirited Away.”

The win served as a “wake-up call for a lot of people in the film business who had been disregarding Japanese animation for years,” says Dr. Jonathan Clements, a researcher of Japanese anime. Japan was the second-highest exporter of video games before the pandemic, representing just over 10% of all global sales worldwide in 2019. On top of that, unlike China, the world leader in video game exports, Japan has created characters that are recognized worldwide. Pokemon alone brought in $5 billion in revenue in the first five years of existence.

Korean Challenge

But even the established soft power of MAG has faced competition over these past few years. One of the most important is Hallyu (Korean Wave), the rise in the popularity of Korean culture around the world. Used in the early 1990s as part of reestablishing diplomatic relations with China, the term describes a soft power that included phenomena like K-pop and K-drama that proved as critical as traditional diplomacy.

Korean boy band BTS reached the top 10 of the Billboard 200 in 2017 with 300 million votes worldwide, generating more engagement on Twitter than artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Justin Bieber. From Psy’s global hit “Oppan Gangnam Style” to the synchronized dancing of the girl band Blackpink, K-pop is a multibillion-dollar industry that unites millions of fans in stadiums around the world and will have its own stadium in 2024 in Seoul as part of the plan to attract more tourists to the country. 

Bong Joon-ho’s K-drama “Parasite” got more than 300 awards worldwide, including best picture at the Academy Awards and the Palm D’Or in Cannes last year, grossing nearly $260 million worldwide. The countries’ film industry has registered constant growth for years, with sales revenues going from 1.22 (2008) to 2.51 (2019) trillion South Korean won. Netflix is set to invest $500 million in 2021, with its Korean subscriber base nearing four million. Minyoung Kim, Netflix vice president of content for Korea, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, says that the streaming platform wants to be part of Hallyu in a “huge moment of national pride,” adding 80 original Korean shows and films to the service.

Will Hallyu be cooler than “Cool Japan” in the following years? The answer is that it’s more likely that both countries will share the leading dominance in Asia’s cultural soft power. This is a positive development for both nations given that they already shared soft-power influence when they hosted the first World Cup to be held in Asia in 2002.

Even without foreign visitors, the Tokyo games may help increase Japan’s soft power by showcasing the country’s rich culture alongside the sporting spectacle to millions around the world. The Olympics are still one of the most-watched events on global television, with US broadcaster NBC alone paying $1.275 billion for broadcasting rights per Olympiad. The International Olympic Committee estimates that 3.6 billion people watched at least one minute of the Rio 2016 games, with over 342 million viewers tuning in for the opening ceremony. Back then, the world was not living with a pandemic. In 2021, even with vaccinations rolling out, many are still favoring home entertainment. This might make the Tokyo Olympics even more popular than Rio’s, which would be a big win for Japan’s soft power.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Will the Tokyo Olympics Increase Japan’s Soft Power? appeared first on Fair Observer.

In late April, Anitta released her most expensive video for her new song, “Girl From Rio.” She had one goal in mind: conquer the ears of the world. Her method was by reshaping a notorious Brazilian cultural soft power known as bossa nova.

The music video begins with clips of the singer dressed like a Hollywood star in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. Surrounded by thin, mostly white men, Anitta sings an English adaptation of the internationally famous “Girl From Ipanema,” which was released in 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes. The video then shows viewers the real Rio de Janeiro. A trap beat drops and our eyes shift to black people dancing in Piscinao de Ramos (Ramos’ Pool), an artificial beach created by the government in 2000 in the suburbs of Rio.

Bolsonaro’s Conservative Brazil?

For two years, Anitta was heavily criticized by fans and artists for not taking a public stance over Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president. During the 2018 election campaign, she was questioned about her absence in the #EleNao (#NotHim) movement against Bolsonaro. At the time, she argued that she was only 25 years old and had zero political knowledge.

Bolsonaro’s nationalist policies aim to bring back the beauty and glory of Brazil’s past. But the truth is that he is more known for his sexist, homophobic and racist declarations from his time in the Chamber of Deputies. Last year, one of his most trusted colleagues, Damares Alves, the minister of human rights, family and women, acted to stop a legal abortion on a 10-year-old girl, who became pregnant after being raped by her own uncle.

With Bolsonaro in power, Brazilians are currently living under a conservative administration. This is particularly reflected in the federal government’s cultural decisions. Bolsonaro’s government monitors exhibitions, music, films and TV shows and assesses if they align with the state’s view of family and religious values.

Anitta has finally posted statements on social media criticizing Bolsonaro’s administration. Yet none of her tweets are as powerful as the message her new video carries.

A Different Rio

“Hot girls, where I’m from, we don’t look like models,” she sings, with scantily clad women dancing on an artificial beach. The song puts an emphasis on women without silicone breasts showing off their bodies with cellulite. The video also shows black men putting cream on women to bleach their body hair, while others barbecue meat on the beach. Some couples even look like they’re almost having sex in the sea. This is a completely different Brazil from the country Bolsonaro wants to portray to the world.

Anitta’s video presents clips of the Rio suburb’s poverty, but in a funny and sexy way. The video focuses on the nostalgic past of a white Rio de Janeiro that never really existed, but whose image was created with the help of the most popular Brazilian rhythm of all time, bossa nova. Translated as “new wave,” this genre is a mix of jazz, African beats and samba.

In 1962, the historical debut at Carnegie Hall by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto helped bring bossa nova to the world stage. In the same year, Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes released “Garota de Ipanema” (Girl From Ipanema), one of the most famous Brazilian songs of all time. The muse to inspire the composers was Helo Pinheiro, a 17-year-old girl with blonde hair and blue eyes who walked every day on the beach.

As a successful singer whose fortune is estimated at $100 million at the age of 28, Anitta’s cultural power overseas is being built song by song. In the past four years, 24 of her 32 singles were dedicated to international markets. Giovanni Bianco, a Brazilian creative director, produced the “Girl From Rio” video. He has worked several times with Madonna, who released the song “Faz Gostoso” with Anitta in 2019.

Changing Bossa Nova

With bossa nova becoming more popular worldwide, the “Girl From Rio” video cost at least $200,000. Anitta has already collaborated with international stars like Maluma, Major Lazer, Cardi B. and J. Balvin. The official launch party of the song took place at Strawberry Moon, a bar at The GoodTime Hotel in Miami whose partner is Pharrell Williams, an American singer and producer.

In May, “Girl from Rio” was the 58th most-listened song on Spotify after its release, with 1 million plays in Brazil and 400,000 in other countries. Although Anitta featured on popular US shows with NBC and also on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” the song soon fell out of the top 100. With 54 million followers on Instagram, the singer’s fans accused Warner Music — the label Anitta is associated with — of not promoting the song worldwide.

In the video, the white images of the 1950s, carried by bossa nova’s soft pace and soft power, give way to the colorful scenes in “Girl From Rio.” With its trap beat and variation of funk, this is the most popular Brazilian genre in the world today. With the help of her record label or not, Anitta wants to conquer the world with a Rio de Janeiro that is far from the one shown on postcards or holiday brochures — and certainly not the one Bolsonaro wants to promote.

Anitta wants to focus on empowering black people, women and those with standard bodies, not with abs, breasts and butts like models. She definitely knows what she’s doing.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Why Fame Can Be a Nightmare

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For India, Bollywood is the most important cultural soft power, gripping millions of viewers domestically and internationally. Soft power is the ability to shape the preferences of others through science, diplomacy, sports, religion and culture. This allows a country to attract other peoples through seduction rather than coercion. According to India Brand Equity Foundation, the Indian media and entertainment industry, which Bollywood plays a major role in, has “the potential to reach” $100 billion by 2030. In 2019, Bollywood made more than $2.8 billion. Before the COVID-19 pandemic led to major financial losses, the industry had been projected to hit $4.5 billion in 2021.

“The White Tiger”

Yet despite being worth so much, Bollywood has once again missed out on the chance to get the last shining prize for its soft power: an internationally acclaimed award. On April 25, India will be part of the 93^rd Academy Awards, but not as a result of a Bollywood flick. “The White Tiger,” a Netflix production directed by Ramin Bahrani, is nominated for best adapted screenplay. Based on Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel, the movie was shot in India but not produced by any of the hundreds of Bollywood studios located in the country.

“The White Tiger” tells the story of Balram — played by Adarsh Gourav — who moves from a poor rural village to Delhi to become a rich man’s driver. After deciding to commit a crime to escape the complex stratification of Indian society, he becomes wealthy himself. The rags-to-riches story is as rare as a white tiger, as the metaphor of the title suggests. Paolo Carnera’s cinematography frequently shows the dirty streets and misery of life in India for the poor, while Bahrani’s script is full of jokes and criticism about the country’s poverty and social inequality — completely different from what we are used to seeing in most Bollywood movies.

Hollywood is recognized for its achievements in production design, cinematography, screenplay, acting and directing at major festivals in Cannes, Berlin and London. Yet Bollywood continues to miss out on awards, a crucial prize for any movie industry. The same thing happened in 2009 when “Slumdog Millionaire” — which tells the story of Jamal Malik (played by Dev Patel) growing up in Mumbai slums — won eight Oscars, including best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay. That movie was based on Indian writer Vikas Swarup’s novel, “Q & A,” but shot by British director Danny Boyle.

The closest Bollywood came to an Academy Award was with Mehboob Khan’s melodrama “Mother India,” which was nominated for best foreign language in 1958; the movie told the story about the struggles of a woman raising her sons alone. In 2001, Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan produced and acted in “Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India,” which centered on a small village in Victorian India staking its future on a game of cricket against the British rulers. The film was nominated for best foreign language a year later but failed to win. 

Bollywood’s Shortcomings

So, why can’t Bollywood conquer Hollywood and win a golden statue? I went to India in 2008 for an investigation into the country’s movie industry, which also led to my first book, “Diário de Bollywood” (Bollywood Diaries), released in 2009 in Brazil. Before packing my bags for the trip, I watched over 50 Bollywood movies to prepare my questions for the producers, actors, directors and executives of the industry. I soon realized that all those films back then had something in common: there were no sex scenes or nudity, they never mentioned or critically analyzed India’s social caste system, and they avoided making political comments.

Bollywood movies lack gripping human stories and resonant storytelling, which is why they are unable to transcend their culture. They provide an escapist fantasy to Indian audiences but do not work for most viewers outside India. These non-daring storylines lack the quality to win awards at major festivals, including the Oscars. So, why can’t a multibillion-dollar movie industry improve its films? The simple answer is that it can but won’t for two main reasons: escapism and censorship.

First, Bollywood has become a form of escapist entertainment from the reality of India. Often three hours long, the movies are usually full of rich and beautiful stars, singing and dancing and exploring their love lives, only to be interrupted by cruel villains who are defeated in the end. India’s post-production is among the top of the world in special effects, color and sound corrections, displaying beautiful scenes that serve as distractions to the hundreds of millions of Indians who live below the poverty line.

India is one of the oldest cultures of the world and is extremely rich and diverse. It’s also a modern country with cutting-edge technology. However, all those social, economic, sexual, cultural and even psychological changes and diversity are not embraced in most Bollywood blockbusters. Instead, they are distanced themselves from reality and offer trite stories as entertainment.

Second, the Cinematograph Act of 1952 determines “principles for guidance in certifying films.” Censor boards were set in production areas of India, such as Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. The closest to a sex scene that Indian movies largely feature quick kisses and partial nudity. If a film does not meet the guidelines set for “decency or morality,” then it doesn’t receive the certificate that allows it to be screened in movie theaters.

In the 2000s, with the arrival of the internet and the rise of downloading foreign movies, often pornographic, some changes were seen in Bollywood. In 2013, Sunny Leone, a Canadian-American former porn star of Indian descent, debuted in the film “Jism 2,” an erotic thriller that shows her topless from behind while being intimate with a man. Yet India, the country where Kama Sutra originated, still doesn’t make movies with deep kissing, explicit sex scenes or bold storylines.

That doesn’t mean that films with sex and nudity are better than blockbusters with music and dancing. Good movies often reflect creatively and boldly the changes in society and the world. Hollywood absorbed those changes in post-Vietnam movies such as “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989) and “Full Metal Jacket” (1987), in contrast to jingoistic and formulaic “The Green Berets” (1968) and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). All four films were box office hits, but the first two — directed by Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick, respectively — established Hollywood’s international reputation because of their sophisticated stories about the Vietnam War.

The Challenge Facing Bollywood

Bollywood is trying to emulate Hollywood. Whistling Woods International, a film school in Mumbai with American investors, is teaching aspiring film professionals. “In India, we must prepare our students to begin at the top of the movie pyramid, because the base pays almost nothing,” said Kurt Inderbitzin, the dean of the school back when I visited India. “Our challenge is to teach students to develop good characters and directing skills, since many of them arrive here with prejudices, imagining they don’t need to learn this kind of stuff, although these are the basic elements of a good film, like the concept of gravity for an astronaut.”

Better films lead to international awards and increase the chances of reaching commercial movie theaters. Better box office results in big markets like the US and Europe would help Bollywood develop India’s soft power. Bollywood faces major competition from streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ that are producing films and television series themselves. Bolder and richer movies may be just what Bollywood needs to keep conquering the hearts and minds of the public in the 21^st century.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Bollywood’s Soft Power Is Not Enough for the Oscars appeared first on Fair Observer.

Foreign-Language Entertainment Is Having Its Soft-Power Moment

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Is this new status enough for China? Probably not. New blockbusters will soon rebalance these numbers, but soft power — the ability to seduce people from all over the world through culture — takes time to build up. Soft power also brings lasting income to its country of origin in terms of products and services, like tourism for example. When in 1934, Walt Disney began work on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” other film studio chiefs derided the project as “Disney’s Folly,” since adults, not children, were considered to be primary consumers. These executives forgot that children watch films over and over again and want all the related merchandise. “Snow White” went on to become the first film in history to gross $100 million, selling 400 million tickets from 1937 to 1948.

Welcome to Chinawood

These are just numbers. Disney’s greatest achievement was making his creations into lucrative vehicles of US culture for decades to come. That is what China wants to achieve. It has been taking similar steps ever since farmer-turned-entrepreneur Xu Wenrong began building Hengdian World Studios in the 1990s. Known as Chinawood, it became the largest outdoor film studio in the world and one of China’s biggest domestic tourist attractions, offering historic film sets, a resort hotel and live performances. Marketing itself “China’s tourism and performing arts capital,” Chinawood attracts thousands of TV shows and film productions every year.

Also, since fewer than 40 foreign films are allowed to take a bite of this massive market due to a strict quota system, Chinawood also houses foreign productions like “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” a Hollywood-Chinawood co-production (these escape quota restrictions), starring the likes of Brendan Fraser and Jet Li, grossed over $400 million worldwide in the first 21 weeks of its release.

Is this enough to make Chinawood a new soft power? The answer is, probably not. Because Chinawood productions face a similar challenge as all the other blockbusters shot in the country, these films often lack creativity, self-criticism, audacity and freedom. Take the recent historical war drama, Guan Hu’s “The Eight Hundred,” for example. The film — at $470 million, 2020’s top-grossing production — pushed China to the number one spot in global box office revenues. However, most of this profit comes from China itself and not international markets. While European and US theaters still struggle to open because of COVID-19, even without the pandemic, it’s hard to say that such productions could help the Chinese film industry overseas.

“The Eight Hundred” was abruptly pulled from a scheduled premiere at the Shanghai Film Festival in 2019 without an explanation. A version shorter by 11 minutes later opened in theaters, with much fewer scenes involving Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces. Besides likely censorship, what may explain the little impact the film had internationally, as the film critic Tony Rayns suggests, is that while avoiding the “rabid China-is-top-dog quality of the Wolf Warrior movies,” its “spirit is resolutely neo-nationalist,” with “all the bombast and jingoism of the current moment.”

Hollywood became an effective soft powerhouse not only because of million-dollar budgets and top-quality products, but also thanks to creative freedom. For instance, Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989) and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979), both masterpieces, were expressly critical of US military intervention in Vietnam. The films are also on the patriotic side, with American values overemphasized. However, by criticizing America’s own culture and politics, the films are far from being hard-power propaganda.

Hard Power Interference

The Communist Party of China (CPP), on the other hand, interferes directly in cultural productions. According to a report by James Tager, PEN America’s deputy director of Free Expression Research and Policy, since 2011, the CCP’s Central Committee issued a statement declaring the “urgency for China to strengthen its cultural soft power and global cultural influence.” As Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin write in The Guardian, the party is trying to “reshape the global information environment with massive infusions of money” with the aim being to “influence public opinion overseas in order to nudge foreign governments into making policies favorable toward China’s Communist Party.”

The official People’s Daily once declared, “we cannot be soft on soft power,” calling for culture must be exported in order to strengthen China’s international stance. Chinawood is part of this effort, which includes $10 billion spent annually on public diplomacy, in contrast with $2 billion allocated by the US Department of State in 2018. Soft power works well when China opens hundreds of Confucius Institutes to spread its language and culture around the world. What doesn’t work is when the same party severely punishes Chinese ethnical minorities, like the Muslim Uighurs facing persecution in Xinjiang.

China already has an important cultural soft power: its art, poetry, painting, sculpture and pottery, from the early imperial dynasties to the 20^th century, coveted by museums and collectors around the world. It succeeds because the state hard power doesn’t interfere significantly with it. But when it comes to contemporary culture — films, games, TV shows and apps like Tik Tok — Chinese hard power seems to impose harmful control. That’s not how soft power works. It needs freedom and self-criticism to produce genuine and seductive art.

George Orwell once said that “Journalism is printing what someone does not want printed; everything else is public relations.” The phrase also pertains to the arts and the entertainment industry. When President Xi Jinping says that “the stories of China should be well told, voices of China well spread and characteristics of China well explained,” by “well” he probably means “positive.” That is definitely not how one wins soft power for the long term.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can Chinawood Win Soft Power for Beijing? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Racism in America Leaves Its Soft Power Greatly Weakened

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The Oscars may be just following a much bigger trend in entertainment in the past few years, with non-English-language shows becoming international hits even in markets like the US and the UK that don’t consume a lot of dubbed or subtitled content. The American review website Rotten Tomatoes chose Netflix’s first German-language show, “Dark,” as the best Netflix Original series among 63 competitors, getting 80% of the 2.5 million votes, against English-language hits like “Mindhunters” and “The Crown.”

Bound to Lead

Latin and, much later, French, were the international languages for diplomacy, the theater and literature. British imperial power put the English language at the center of world affairs and, right as that empire faded, American dominance reinforced its importance. But it was Hollywood’s soft power over the 20^th century that made the English language seductive and attractive the world over.

In his 1990 work “Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power,” political scientist Joseph Nye used the term “soft power” to define the ability to get something by persuasion, not coercion or payment. Governments need to spend much less money when national culture, ideals and values appeal to the wider world, generating revenues in tourism, arts and entertainment. In other words, soft power is a smart tool for any nation to reach its worldwide goals instead of opting for threats, guns and war.

Hollywood shaped the preferences of a large number of audiences for English-language films and TV shows since the creation of the studios in the 1910s. Other countries took advantage of that. The British Council, established in 1934 and currently presented in over 100 countries, invests in keeping the English language a powerful medium in which the arts, diplomacy, entertainment, science and technology are conducted. With a budget of £1,3 billion ($1,6 billion) in 2019-20, the organization views English as a way to communicate culture, allowing the British Council to frame culture and language as political tools through which soft power can be garnered, strengthening the UK’s reputation across the world.

But quality entertainment like “Dark” can make even a difficult language like German more appealing to a global audience. The second season of Iceland’s “Trapped” was watched by 10 million people in the UK, Germany, France and across Scandinavia. It focuses on a series of mysterious murders in a freezing small town where policemen never fire guns — a cultural shock for audiences accustomed to violence in Hollywood productions. Distribution demand for the Spanish “La Casa de Papel” soared for its fourth season: From April 3 to 5 this year, the show was 31.75 times more in demand than popular English-language series like “The Walking Dead,” “Westworld” and “Game of Thrones.”

The show not only broke the aversion to foreign languages among audiences, but also made popular other forms of expression instead of repeating well-worn Hollywood formulas. John Doyle writes in The Globe and Mail that “La Casa de Papel” is a “heist-centric multipart drama that upends most clichés of heist movies and celebrates others. It is also deliciously melodramatic at times, riffing on the telenovela style of telling one concentrated storyline that has outrageous twists and much passion.”

Leaving the Telenovela Behind

Netflix, which is represented in 190 countries, has become one of the main producers of foreign-language hits, with other shows breaking the English barrier, such as the Turkish “The Protector,” French “Osmosis,” Polish “The Woods” and South Korea’s “Kingdom.” According to Louis Brennan, a professor at Trinity College, Dublin, who researches Netflix’s international expansion, the success of non-English language shows can be explained by the natural appeal of local products, together with a tendency toward broader and more diverse tastes of consumers in the 21^st century.

As John Hazelton writes in Screen Daily, American programmers feel a growing appetite for foreign-language shows despite the fact that foreign films are being watched less in the cinemas, suggesting a migration from the big to the smaller screen, and streaming. Hazelton quotes Jan Diedrichsen, the general manager of Sundance TV, saying that “Back in the day, if audiences wanted something adventurous they would go to arthouses and see those independent or foreign films. Now on television we’re providing that adventure and a window into some of the best stories from around the world.”

In the US, the viewership of non-English titles on Netflix increased 50% this year compared with 2019 and the consumption of dubbed films and shows is rising 120% every year, according to some of the very few audience statistics the company shares.

Known for exporting its telenovelas for more than 130 countries for the past 30 years, with 100 million daily viewers worldwide, Brazilian TV Globo is aware that the telenovela format may become less relevant as streaming subscriptions soar all over the world. In 2015, the company launched GloboPlay, its own streaming service. This year, TV Globo released the terror thriller “Desalma,” with clear intention to overcome the image of a telenovela channel, aiming at international markets.

To compete with major players like Netflix and Amazon Prime, GloboPlay announced a partnership with Disney Plus, launched in Brazil this November, with subscriptions for both streaming services starting at 37,90 reais ($6,99). US-based network HBO recently announced six new local productions for the following years as Brazil is fast becoming one of the key global streaming markets.

Just a few years ago, producers who wanted to reach an international audience needed to embrace English-language soft power even if that caused cultural distortions in the final product, like in Fernando Meirelles’s 2008 film “Blindness,” the English adaptation of the Portuguese book of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, or “Love in the Time of Cholera,” directed by Mike Newell, adapted from Gabriel García Márquez’s novel of the same title. In both cases, the original language — Portuguese and Spanish, respectively — are key elements to the charm and beauty of the novels. The slang, local accents and neologisms were all the elements that helped both authors win the Nobel Prize for Literature but were, unfortunately, partly lost in translation to film.

With local artists and producers getting the taste of English soft power, audiences from all over the world can finally enjoy a much broader and immersive experience of other cultures from the comfort of their own homes — and with good entertainment, of course.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Is Brazil’s Soft Power Under Threat?

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It’s almost impossible not to be seduced by the rhythm, the beautiful men and women dancing on a paradisiacal Caribbean beach in the video clip. Seduction is a key element to soft power that works through attraction instead of coercion, which is the prerogative of hard power projected via politics and economics. Soft power shapes the preference of other people and societies through culture, diplomacy, science and religion. It is usually the best propaganda for any country precisely because it doesn’t look propaganda, with credibility being an important element of the message it carries.

Favorite Genre

Hollywood, one of the most successful vehicles of soft power globally, needed more than just one film to achieve its levels of influence in the 20^th century. So, is Latin music a new soft power, or is “Despacito” a rare phenomenon? Latin music has been internationally renowned for decades, with bossa nova and tango capturing audiences the world over. But the number of Latin artists wining important international awards and topping charts like Billboard appears to be a more recent phenomenon.

According to Rolling Stone magazine’s 2018 list of the 50 Greatest Latin Pop Songs from 1950 to now, 24 of the 50 are from the past 25 years, including songs like Ricky Martin’s 1995 hit “María,” “A Dios le Pido” by Juanes from 2002, Julieta Venegas’“Algo Esta Cambiando” from 2003 and Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie,” released in 2006, among others. This trend may just be a new outlet of soft power for the continent.

Artists from all over the world are being seduced by Latin music, inspiring increasingly more international collaborations. In 2019, the Swedish singer Tove Lo went to São Paulo to produce “Are U Gonna Tell Her?” with Brazilian funk singer MC Zaac, a racy and rather Latin-looking clip, sung in English and Portuguese. The American magazine Variety claims that Brazilian singer Anitta “offers a much more interesting counterpoint to Madonna than Britney Spears,” referring to their collaboration on “Faz Gostoso” on Madonna’s 14^th album “Madame X.”

We can thank funk music for this trend. Although funk has its origins in black communities in 1950s America, with artists like Horace Silver and, later, James Brown, Brazil’s carioca funk was born in the 1970s in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, but still mostly focused on remixes. Later in that decade, it became the rhythm we know today, with faster beats, more erotic and original lyrics about guns, drug trafficking and other favela problems.

However, it is only in the past 20 years that Brazilian funk got a new look, with songs identified more heavily with Brazil’s black community and the nouveau riche that became known as funk ostentacao, or ostentation funk. That is when funk became another Latin hit on the internet, with artists like Anitta, Ludmilla and videos by KondZilla getting millions of views on YouTube and SoundCloud. The rhythm was once known for its violent, sexist and pornographic lyrics. But that also changed in the past few years, with new variations like indie funk offering a dance beat and romantic lyrics, and building on influences ranging from MPB (Brazilian pop music), pop and bregga, or tacky.

As a result, funk became the most-listened-to Brazilian music genre in foreign countries. “Bum Bum Tam Tam,” by MC Fioti, released in 2017, is the first Brazilian song to reach 1 billion views on YouTube, with views abroad overtaking the domestic audience. According to a survey from DeltaFolha, of the 200 most-listened-to songs on Spotify in 51 countries, funk is the favorite Brazilian genre internationally.

Seduced by Latin Music

Reggaeton is another Latin rhythm that is part of this soft power. Born in the Caribbean countries like Puerto Rico, Panama and the Dominican Republic in the 1980s, it has grown into a bigger phenomenon in the 2000s. Daddy Yankee and Snow’s “Con Calma” had over 1.6 billion views on YouTube last year and has been awarded the 2019 Premio Lo Nuestro — an annual award presented by Univision TV channel in the US since 1989 to distinguish the new talent of Latin music. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s list of the top songs for the summer of 2020 includes famous reggaeton hits like Bad Bunny’s “Yo Perreo Solo.”

It’s not the first time that Latin music becomes a soft power. In the 1950s, Brazilian bossa nova, which translates as “new wave,” seduced hearts and minds all over the world, with a genre that mixes samba, jazz and African beats. Singers like João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim made a historical debut at the Carnegie Hall in 1962, introducing bossa nova to American audiences. Two days before the show, the White House organized a party, and Jackie Kennedy, a big fan of the rhythm, insisted on Brazilian music as the main theme. American jazz artists like Quincy Jones, Herbie Mann, Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd soon started to record bossa nova. Bebel Gilberto, the daughter of João Gilberto, made her career in the US with bossa nova.

At the same time that bossa nova swept the world, tango was also conquering the global radio waves. This rhythm of Argentina is responsible for a multimillion-dollar industry, involving festivals and numerous tango houses that have been drawing tourists from all over the world for over 70 years. The genre of Astor Piazzolla, Julio Sosa and Carlos Gardel captivated Hollywood, becoming central to films like “Scent of a Woman,” which grossed $135 million worldwide and won an Academy Award for Al Pacino.

Bossa nova and tango conquered the world long before the birth and popularity of music festivals and multimillion tours. Although the music industry almost collapsed in the 2000s as the internet made music freely available, streaming saw its first significant growth in 2015. And it’s in this new era of YouTube and Spotify hits that Latin artists are shaping the tastes of their audiences — a soft power that gives the continent a distinct voice in the world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Latin Music Is Seducing the World All Over Again appeared first on Fair Observer.

Over the decades, Brazil has built a very positive international image. It was seen by a large portion of the world as a happy, multicultural, multiracial country fond of parties, high-spirited and exuberant in nature. This may not be true, but it doesn’t matter because in business, image sometimes counts more than reality itself.

Image is power — soft power. The term was created by the American political scientist Joseph Nye in the 1980s to designate the ability to attract rather than coerce (through hard power), to shape the preferences of others through appeal and attraction, through culture, sport, idiom, political values, religion, science, etc. Hollywood, the biggest cultural soft power in the world, was able to destabilize closed regimes, like that of the Soviet Union toward its collapse, through its films.

Jair Bolsonaro’s Image Crisis

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Efficient soft power brings profits, tourism and social and technological gains to societies. Renaissance art not only softened the image of the Catholic Church but also shaped Italy — which didn’t even exist as a unified country at that time — as one of the greatest international tourist destinations of the world.

The popularity of the English language brought many benefits to countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, facilitating, for example, the international sales of cultural products like films and TV shows. Ballet is a common “business card” for Russian diplomats, seducing the world with art instead of sanctions and guns. The Japanese MAG (manga, anime and games) culture is voraciously consumed even by historic archenemies such as China and South Korea. 

Soft Power vs. Hard Power

Although Brazil doesn’t have a universally spoken language or great technology to serve its cause, it accumulated massive reserves of cultural soft power over the last decades. And this doesn’t even include the obvious — football, whose soft power withered somewhat after its humiliating 7:1 loss against Germany in the 2014 World Cup. But all this great cultural soft power is currently being dilacerated by the hard power installed in Brasilia last year, in the shape of the country’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro.

Carnival is one of the most efficient forms of soft power, one that helped build an image of a friendly and tolerant Brazil. It attracts millions of tourists from all over the world, and footage of its parades is sold to hundreds of TV channels worldwide. This year, President Bolsonaro decided to talk about the event on Twitter. But instead of using it in Brazil’s favor, he posted a video of a man stripping naked and making obscene gestures during a street party in Sao Paulo.

His tweet drew international attention and contributed to weakening Brazil’s soft power. Instead of reinforcing an image of a happy celebration, Bolsonaro created a pornographic and chaotic image of carnival in just one tweet. An isolated and unfortunate case took on an international dimension when the country’s president singled out this angle for comment.

The president again made international headlines when he declared that Brazil should not become a “paradise for the gay world.” At a meeting with journalists last year, Bolsonaro said that “whoever wants to come here to have sex with a woman, feel free. … Brazil cannot be a country in the gay world, with gay tourism. We have families.” For a president who wants to make Brazilian economy grow, this is not only homophobic, but ill-considered. Sao Paulo is the home of the biggest LGBT parade in the world, inspiring shows like Netflix’s “Sense 8.” This year, the parade attracted over 3 million people, with hotels fully booked for days. While some developed countries fight to attract more tourists, Brazil closes its doors to one of its most profitable and democratic events.

Then, late last month, Brazil’s Ministry of Citizenship not only announced an abrupt reduction of investment in cultural events and products like theater plays, musicals, films and TV shows, but also started an ideological campaign against all cultural manifestations that undermine “traditional family values.” But culture only becomes soft power when it’s free to manifest ideas creatively. Hollywood became a soft power giant because no American president tried to boycott its products internationally, even when the studios produced films that went directly against the interests of Washington, like the Vietnam War films of Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick and Oliver Stone.

The witch-hunt also affected Apex, the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency that works to promote Brazilian products and services worldwide. The dismissal of its president, Mario Vilalva, following a clash with Brazil’s foreign minister, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to far-right ideological control that the Bolsonaro government wants to exercise over an agency that, in order to be efficient, needs freedom, rationality and business flair to sell Brazil’s products abroad.

Everything’s Not Lost

But not everything is lost — yet. Brazil still has two other great cultural icons that, for now, are immune from hard-power attacks. Bossa Nova is still widely listened to, bought and used in films, soap operas and shows in places as distant from Brazil as the US, Japan and Australia. For now, no Bossa Nova artist is being undermined by the government, although Bolsonaro is not a big fan of Brazilian singer and composer Chico Buarque, a close friend of former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Another source of Brazilian soft power is its soap operas. Just like the carnival, they helped shape Brazil’s image as a friendly, welcoming place. TV Globo — the channel of the largest media group in Latin America — has been exporting its soap operas to over 100 countries since the 1980s, becoming an important cultural symbol. “Escrava Isaura” (“Isaura the Slave”) was sold to 80 countries, watched by some 1 billion viewers in China alone.

A street market in Angola’s capital Luanda was named Roque Santeiro in 1991 because of the success of the eponymous soap opera. Paladar, the restaurant owned by Raquel (Regina Duarte) in the soap “Vale Tudo,” gave its name to many of the newly authorized private restaurants during Cuba’s economic opening in the 1990s. There are even reports that the screenings of “Sinhá Moça” interrupted fighting during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Nicaragua. This is soft power at its best.

However, TV Globo seems to be more and more in opposition to the Bolsonaro administration, especially because the president is giving clear preference to the second-largest broadcaster, TV Record, owned by Edir Macedo, the billionaire founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, whose religious and ideological views are openly aligned with the president’s. TV Record is also famous for producing religion-themed soap operas like “A Terra Prometida”(“The Promised Land”) and “Jezebel,” which are far less creative and inferior in terms of production and narrative.

Who knows, Jair Bolsonaro might use his hard power to give his favorite TV station a push to become a soft power to rival the leading channel he never gives interviews to. But that’s now how soft power works in arts and entertainment: Creativity must walk hand in hand with freedom. And Brazil’s new president is not a big fan of the last one.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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