It is only since the advent of talking pictures in the late 1920s, that "foreign films" have been considered a separate subject area. During the silent-movie era, filmmaking was an international art. Intertitles were easily translated and, more importantly, directors told their stories in pictures. Actors communicated through their bodies and faces, not their voices, and images were a universal language. There were distinctive, thriving film industries not just in America, but also in Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Scandinavia. Sergei Eisenstein led the Soviet avantgardists with the operatic polemics The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927). Fritz Lang virtuosically moved across genres: epic Siegfrieds Tod (1923), futuristic allegory Metropolis (1926), science fiction in Die Frau Im Mond (1928), and crime in M (1931). F.W. Murnau's camera work became more and more fluid from Nosferatu (1922) through The Last Laugh (1924) to the Hollywood-made Sunrise (1927), which dispensed with intertitles almost completely.

The coming of sound gave actors voices, but it forced them to hover around microphones and restricted the mobility of the camera. Careers foundered when the voices of stars failed to measure up to their looks. Greta Garbo easily made the transition from European silent (G.W. Pabst's Joyless Street, 1925) to American talkie (Anna Christie, 1931), but it became increasingly difficult for international filmmakers and stars to find the universal audience once sound had raised the language barrier. One solution, very common during the early 1930s, was the simultaneous production of different versions of the same film or story, using multiple casts in different languages -- thus, Flying Platform 1 was shot with German-, French-, and English-speaking casts (led by Peter Lorre, Charles Boyer, and Conrad Veidt, respectively), utilizing the same special effects and action shots; and Dracula (1931) was shot with a Spanish-language cast on the very same sets where Bela Lugosi did the role in English.

The coming of World War II reduced the output of movies in Europe, and the war itself choked off both the flow of foreign films and the opportunities to see them in America, as the U.S. film industry's output expanded mightily throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. After the war, audiences and opportunities for exposure emerged once again, and foreign films started getting better United States distribution.

A legitimate "art house" circuit developed in the major cities, especially on the East Coast, catering to a small but dedicated audience interested in serious European and Japanese films, though this audience also managed to sustain such mildly titillating exploitation films as Bitter Rice (1948), the artistic virtues of which were probably less responsible for its U.S. success than the physique of its leading lady, Silvana Mangano, which was displayed in ways that Hollywood producers could only envy. Occasionally, a title such as Roberto Rossellini's Paisan (1946) or Open City (1945), or Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948), would attract a somewhat bigger audience, and receive showings on a slightly wider basis, and during the early 1950s, Japanese directors Akira Kurosawa and Hiroshi Inagaki had outright hits -- albeit on a small scale compared with Hollywood's own releases -- with such films as Rashomon (1950), The Seven Samurai (1954), and Samurai 1 (1954).

The other side of foreign films consisted of the bonehead sword-and-sandal epics, shot mostly in Italy and often hilariously dubbed into English, which featured former bodybuilding champions such as Steve Reeves. These films, although derided by critics, proved enormously popular during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and became an industry unto themselves.

The late 1950s and early 1960s also saw an explosion of interest in serious foreign films, shot in black-and-white (at a time when Hollywood had gone almost entirely to color) and released with subtitles rather than dubbed into English: The intellectual experiments of Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, 1959; Alphaville, 1965); Ingmar Bergman's wintry fairy tales (The Seventh Seal, 1957; The Virgin Spring, 1959) and dissections of entropic families (Through A Glass Darkly, 1961; The Silence, 1963). The entertainment segment of the foreign-film continuum could also reward the serious cineaste at times, as the cult following for Mario Bava's stylized shockers (Black Sunday, 1960; Black Sabbath, 1963) illustrates. The spaghetti western became a vehicle for the genius of Sergio Leone (A Fistful Of Dollars, 1964) as well as launching Clint Eastwood's career as an international star.

Foreign films also offered American audiences something more sexually explicit than they were used to, with movies such as Pietro Germi's Divorce -- Italian Style (1962) and Roger Vadim's Brigitte Bardot vehicle And ... God Created Woman (1956). Sometimes, the double meaning of "art house" as a venue for both serious and risque movies led to interesting marketing: Marco Ferreri's Queen Bee (1963), a sly satire on Italian gender stereotypes starring Ugo Tognazzi and Marina Vlady, was repackaged with the racy title The Conjugal Bed.

There was little chance, however, that any audience would mistake the work of the Italian neo-realists, such as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, and the French New Wave, embodied by Francois Truffaut. Shown in big-city art houses and college film societies, European films were often downbeat, left wing, gritty, and technically self-conscious, full of jump cuts and playful interruptions in continuity. Films such as Jules And Jim (1961) and the Godard-Truffaut collaboration Breathless also had their own kind of counter-culture glamour, embodied in the sensual, deceptively deadpan Jeanne Moreau, and the doomed, gallantly jokey Jean-Paul Belmondo. The filmmakers of the French New Wave were theorists as well as directors. They idolized and deconstructed American B movies, and conceptualized their enthusiasms in journals such as "Cahiers du Cinema."

Foreign films could be more grittily realistic than the homegrown variety, but they could also be more exotic. Early Federico Fellini films, such as The White Shiek (1951) and I Vitelloni (1953), are gentle satires of smalltown aspirations. Fellini later made bigger, more bizarre films; the self-mocking apologia 8-1/2 (1963) begins a series of increasingly baroque flights of fancy. The truest surrealist of them all, Luis Bunuel, began making films by collaborating with Salvador Dali on Un Chien Andalou (1928). In L'Age D'Or (1930) and Los Olvidados (1950), he mixed social protest with hallucination; Viridiana (1961) and The Exterminating Angel (1962), cheerfully plummeted into the darker corners of sexuality, fetishism, Roman Catholicism, bourgeois mores, and liberal pieties.

European films were also noted for their decadence. Luchino Visconti left behind the neo-realism of his earlier films Ossessione (1942) and La Terra Trema (1947), and moved into richly detailed studies historical decay with The Leopard (1963) and The Damned (1969). Michelangelo Antonioni made everyday contemporary banality stylish in L'Avventura (1960), L'Eclisse (1962), and Red Desert (1964). Antonioni also may have had the greatest success of any European director of the 1960s in reaching American audiences, with the MGM-produced Blow Up (1966) and Zabriskie Point (1970).

Postwar German filmmakers took longer to establish themselves in the United States than their French or Italian counterparts. Rainer Werner Fassbinder conflated Germany's troubled World War II experience with neo-Hollywood glamour in The Marriage Of Maria Braun (1978) and Veronika Voss (1982), filtering it all through a hippie drug haze. While Werner Herzog explored epic self-delusion in Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Wim Wenders made low-key meditations on road pictures (Alice In The Cities, 1973).

No discussion of foreign films would be complete without acknowledging the remarkable variety of Japanese film. The extroverted Akira Kurosawa is still probably the best known of Japanense directors, and his most popular films -- Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, and The Hidden Fortress (1958) -- have been recycled by Hollywood as The Outrage (Martin Ritt, 1964), The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960), and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), respectively, while Sergio Leone used Yojimbo (1960) as the basis for A Fistful of Dollars. The exquisitely low-key dramas of Yasujiro Ozu, on the other hand, are limited to what a camera at tatami-mat level can see of a domestic interior (Late Spring, 1949; Tokyo Story, 1953). Kenji Mizoguchi's "women's pictures," such as Ugetsu (1952) and Street Of Shame (1956) were sociologically rich, and offered splendid vehicles for actresses.

It sometimes seems as if the golden age of the foreign film in America has passed. A new generation of American directors -- Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese -- has recaptured the world market. The large theater chains have tended to homogenize the offerings, and fewer screens are available for foreign films, even in New York City and Los Angeles. The competition for those few screens is fiercer than ever, with the emerging cinemas of China, Hong Kong, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East jostling with European and Japanese films for priority. Video has been taking up the slack for some genres as the number of screens dwindles, but the number of foreign films released is still limited.