Tyler Cowen, the economist, advises readers to “snap up foreign fiction translated into English, if only because the selection pressures are so severe”: in order for a publisher to think a work of fiction worth the risk of translating and promoting to a foreign audience, its quality has on average to be higher than the average for homegrown work.
It used to operate the same way for music as well: the hurdles to getting music from Africa or South America or Asia released and promoted in the west were so high that only the better stuff got through, and the average world music release was better than the average pop album.
I've written on this strategy before: the more (and harsher) external selection pressures to which you subject your cultural experiences, the fewer you have to exercise yourself. Per the above, if you limit yourself to foreign fiction that had to survive the translation/promotion gauntlet, you'll have a smaller but much stronger pool of choices. Despite the article's reservations, the same still (sort of) goes for music: snag the stuff that had to see hell to get to to you, no matter where you may be.
This sits right in line with my advice to friends looking to get into film but unwilling or unable to pile as much time into it as does the neighborhood cinéaste: go old, go foreign. While not a flawless prophylactic against suckage — I could name a dozen old foreign pictures, even allegedly "beloved" ones, that aren't worth the light to project them — this procedure surely beats recency-biased random selection. To aspiring American seekers of quality film, I suggest spending a year viewing only non-American movies that are at least thirty years old. Attach one more filter mandating that, if DVDs, they must be released by the Criterion Collection, and you're also almost guaranteed a rich presentation.
I can, under these rules, generate almost effortlessly a viewing plan that includes Seven Samurai, The 400 Blows, Walkabout, High and Low, Andrei Rublev, Branded to Kill, Autumn Sonata, Cléo from 5 to 7, Good Morning, L'avventura, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Solaris, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Tokyo Story, Diary of a Country Priest, Le Samouraï, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Vengeance is Mine, The Face of Another and Last Year at Marienbad. Watch just those and you've had a better film experience than most. Hell, watch just those and you've had a better life than most.
If you'd like to get seriously stringent, apply a cost of production filter as well, to ensure maximum creativity. (Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy, here you come.) It's like wine grapes: you want to drink the stuff made out of vines that had to fight, and hard, to see the light of day. It's no coincidence that capricious weather conditions and stratum upon stratum of unfriendly ground produce the grapes of some of the most complex, enjoyable wines out there.
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