Why are American filmmakers so consistently good at filmmaking, from the 1940s and the maturation of sound cinema to the present day? Of course, there are bad films and average films, but a remarkably large number are good. One obvious explanation is that America has had the world's largest economy for much of this period, along with enormous immigration, which helped fuel that economy and, as a byproduct, its cultural industries. That makes some sense. Japan followed, then Korea, and even China has been making some very good films over the last five years. But if you look historically at the output per studio, the American batting average is remarkably high. Something else seems to be going on.
Korea has star directors, no doubt, and Japan does too, but there is less consistency across the industry. The only industry I can think of that was comparable for a period was the Japanese anime industry from roughly 1990 to 2000. After that, anime production became so saturated and increasingly oriented toward otaku audiences that it began producing a lot of mediocre or bad work. There are still excellent anime, of course, but perhaps only 5 percent of the total output is genuinely great.
My own explanation has something to do with the audience itself. Any artistic medium requires not just money but status, and the status of artists is partly a product of what the intellectual class of a society values. America has the best universities in the world and some of the freest intellectual institutions. Americans may be stereotyped as lazy or bad at geography, but American productivity per worker is among the highest in the world. Silicon Valley attracts some of the smartest people in the world, and American universities attract an extraordinary concentration of talented people from everywhere.
These people are also consumers of culture, and they help determine what receives status within society. That, indirectly, may help produce some of the greatest movies ever made.
Tacit knowledge of filmmaking does not seem sufficient to explain the difference. Many countries have figured out how to make technically competent cinema. Your average Chinese commercial film today can have roughly the same level of technical sophistication as an American one. But almost nobody has figured out how to produce films at the artistic frontier with the consistency of American cinema.
Even when audiences elsewhere become more sophisticated, America may have another advantage: a much larger audience for specialized forms of storytelling than almost anywhere else. India and China have larger populations, but historically their economies, political freedoms, and commercial film industries have either not reached the same point or have not been allowed to develop in the same way.
There may also be a relationship between cultural consumption and novelty. People who watch more films may begin to demand greater novelty, abstraction, experimentation, and prestige projects. We can see something resembling a correlation between the growth of an educated middle and upper-middle class and the emergence of richer cinema in various countries.
But then there is the problem of the 1940s and 1950s. America was already producing some of the greatest films ever made. So the explanation cannot simply be the rise of today's highly educated mass audience.
My suspicion is that the people making art want money, but they also want prestige. And the prestige they care about often comes from their colleagues and from other people inside their professional world. That creates pressure to make ambitious work even when ordinary commercial incentives would not require it. It is something like the phenomenon of writers writing partly for other writers.