Politics & Power Quote by Jean-Jacques Annaud

There is a provocation tucked inside Annaud's flattery: Hollywood doesn’t just export films, it exports the operating system that makes “national” cinema legible everywhere. Calling America “the only country capable of producing national movies” sounds like a compliment to scale and craft, but it’s really a diagnosis of cultural hegemony. In most places, a “national film” is intimate by definition - anchored to language, history, and local references that risk becoming niche outside the border. In the American case, those borders have been quietly redrawn by distribution networks, marketing muscle, and decades of genre storytelling that trained global audiences in a shared grammar. The “national” becomes the default.

The line works because it reverses the usual underdog romance of world cinema. Instead of praising specificity, Annaud points to the perverse advantage of universality-by-saturation: America can make a movie about itself and have it read as everyone’s movie. That’s not innate genius; it’s infrastructure. Studios, star systems, streaming pipelines, and a geopolitics of English combine to make American self-mythology feel like common sense.

Context matters: Annaud is a French director who built a career staging stories with international reach (Quest for Fire, The Name of the Rose, Seven Years in Tibet). He knows the bargain firsthand: to travel globally, a film often must translate itself into the cultural terms Hollywood popularized. The subtext is both admiration and lament - a recognition that “global culture” can look suspiciously like one country’s reflection, projected large enough to pass for the world.