Even though many considered this summer to be a dreary season for Hollywood, there were several foreign films that contained the thematic originality and visual excitement that were missing from the big budget blockbusters.

One that stood out in particular was a British film, My Summer of Love, the sophomore work of Polish-born director Pawel Pawlikowski. My Summer of Love deals with the relationship between two teenage girls in rural Yorkshire: Tasmin, a wealthy, refined girl, home from boarding school, and Mona, an orphan who lives above a pub with her ex-con, born-again Christian brother with whom she has a good relationship.

During a lazy and listless summer, Mona fortuitously meets Tasmin, who is riding a white horse in contrast to Mona’s broken down moped. Despite coming from quite visibly different class backgrounds, the pair meet again soon, and strike up a friendship based on their shared feelings of boredom and angst. When Tasmin’s family departs for the summer, Mona moves into their large house, and the two begin a romantic relationship.

Despite the initial obvious symbolism differentiating the two characters, as the relationship blossoms, their class is stripped away. The focus is more on their similarities, particularly their pain and discontent. Mona begins to dress in Tasmin’s old clothes, and the two are frequently unclothed together; the class distinction is symbolically removed as the two have been leveled off.

The removal of class is eventually turned back on us, as it becomes apparent that Tasmin, whose affluence provides a future that Mona lacks, does not return the deep investment Mona has in their relationship. In a key moment, Tasmin declares that if Mona ever left her, she’d kill Mona. Mona replies that if Tasmin ever left her, she’d kill both Tasmin and herself. Tasmin has become Mona’s hope for the future. However, unlike Mona’s family, who has abandoned her in various ways, Tasmin’s returns, and with them we learn the truth behind her summer.

The real gem this summer was The World, a Chinese film directed by Jia Zhangke. Heralded as the principal director of the Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, Jia had previously made films set primarily in the Shangxi province in northern China, including Platform and Unknown Pleasures. Despite much acclaim, his works have had little distribution.

One of the main concerns of Jia’s work has been the urban growth of China under its budding capitalist economy. In a natural step, The World is his first film set in Beijing. The film takes place in a theme park called the World Park, which is a sort of hyper-Epcot, filled with sights and attractions from all over the world. The film presents us with glimpses of the lives and relationships of several of the park’s employees, who have arrived in Beijing from the provinces for work.

The film not only deals with their urbanization, but also puts it in the context of the country trying to deal with its new place on the world stage. The replica “world” recreated in Beijing demonstrates China’s attempts to imitate the rest of the world market.

Jia’s meditative depiction of a post-modern Beijing, in which text messages have become significant forms of communication, is gorgeously filmed with an imaginative eye. Frequently using the icons of the World Park, Jia frames his characters in creative ways that emphasize their place in this emerging globalized China.

Although neither film had a large distribution in the States, they are both slated for DVD release this autumn, and hopefully the audiences that were turned off by Hollywood this summer will find some hope in these intriguing emerging filmmakers.

As you may have noticed from browsing the headlines this summer, Hollywood had a down summer at the box office. What you may not know if you didn’t look past those headlines is that declining theatrical sales hurt movie theaters more than they hurt the large multimedia corporations that finance movie production these days.

Theaters need lots of people going through the turnstiles because they depend heavily not only on tickets, but also on concession sales to turn a profit. However, as Edward Jay Epstein observes, the six major studios — Disney, Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal and Sony, and their subsidiaries — actually lost about $2.2 billion at the worldwide box office in 2004.

This may be counter-intuitive, but it’s possible because studios made a $13.95 billion profit from world video sales in the same year. More surprising yet, the world video market isn’t the studios’ primary source of profits. In 2004, the studios made an additional profit of $15.93 billion through worldwide TV licensing.

That figure includes the major studios’ profits from licensing their films and TV series to major American networks, pay-per-view channels, cable networks, local stations and foreign networks.

To put it simply, an increasingly larger segment of the power brokers in Hollywood aren’t too concerned about declining box office numbers, and many are actually indirectly encouraging it. For evidence of this, one need merely look to the increasingly smaller window studios place between a film’s theatrical and DVD releases.

In addition, Steven Soderbergh, as powerful a filmmaker as there is in Hollywood outside of Spielberg, signed a deal with 2929 Entertainment Company to make six pictures that will be simultaneously released in theaters and on pay-per-view and DVD.

A simple comparison of numbers confirms that the theatrical experience has been moving toward extinction for some time. In the 1940s, more than 60 percent of the population went to the movies every week, compared with only nine percent today.

There’s reason to be concerned that in the foreseeable future movie theaters won’t be able to survive. You may think that they could rely on a dedicated smaller audience, but, as Epstein notes, theaters have many fixed costs, including leases and interest payments that could make this possibility unrealistic in a majority of markets.

Why does it matter that theaters may be dying off? Despite what the average movie review suggests, movies are affected by contextual variables. Anyone who has been unimpressed by a movie on videotape only to rediscover it as an engaging and exciting work on DVD can attest to this. Several critics I read refuse to rate films unless they see them in the theater because they recognize that without that baseline — the larger screen, absence of visual distraction and addition of a larger, generally more enthusiastic audience — they’re going to underrate movies they see on TV, DVD or pay-per-view.

Going to the theater also affects the viewing experience because it requires a certain degree of viewer submission to the film. Unlike at home, you can’t fast forward, stop the movie or adjust the volume.

Going in, theater patrons are generally more committed to seeing the movie all the way through, and this concession of power may tend to result in more powerful cinematic experiences. If theaters die off, we’ll be losing the first and finest platform the movies ever had.

Note: Many of the facts included in the article were culled from articles by Edward Jay Epstein found at

www.slate.msn.com.

—Jacob Ruhe