Bernardo Bertolucci Quotes

Suddenly, the screens were dominated by American entertainment to the extent of something like 95 percent. As a result, audiences turned away from the kinds of films that we used to make.

The French view globalization as synonymous with Americanization, the cultural imperialism that has filled France with bad food, bad films, and English words.

The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

I'm of course disillusioned with what has happened to World cinema. Now cinemas in both Eastern and Western Europe are filled with the same blockbusters from Hollywood.

I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.

And this fear that US models are replacing everything else now spills over from the sphere of culture into our two remaining categories: for this process is clearly, at one level, the result of economic domination - of local cultural industries closed down by American rivals.

So ubiquitous is Western influence that most of the time it is no longer seen as an alien element intruding into non-Western societies. It is an influence that has become integrated into the mind and body, the heart and soul of the non-Western human being. Western dominance, in other words, has become normal, it has become natural. By making it so natural and so normal to be 'Western', the centres of power in the West have achieved their ultimate triumph.

If there is cultural imperialism, it is definitely American.

Cultural contamination that is directed outward is always seen as ‘enlightenment.'

Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.

One thing that is not to be underestimated is American culture's influence on the rest of the world.

I kind of worry about that a little bit - we lost our film culture for 30 years because the Americans came in and bought up all the cinema chains and wouldn't show any Australian films.

A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.

The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before.

There has never been a time in history when more of our "culture" was as "owned" as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.

What will remain of our cultural identity if audiovisual Europe consists of ... sitting in front of Japanese TV sets showing American programs.

When you start exporting ideas, philosophy, behavior, products, ways of living, it becomes an assault on the culture. Americans have to understand that.

We must save America from the missionary idea that you must get the whole world on to the American way of life. This is really a big world danger.

The things and ways the West took to the rest have become the ways of the world.

The issue of American world cultural dominance is moot. All the international debates on the issue seem to be held in English.

The big French movie distributors are the Trojan horse of the American cinema.

Seriously, American pop culture must be the most predominant force on the planet, next to pollution and poverty.

The domination of western values, beliefs and way of life has angered many from the east and in developing countries.

The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.