The next major period of co-productions extended from
the end of the 1940s to the mid-1970s. With the direct
assistance of the US government, Hollywood corporations formed the Motion Picture Export Association of
America (MPEAA) in September 1945 to expand markets and lobby for international free trade of American
films. A series of agreements between the United States
and the western European nations at first allowed for the
almost unchecked flow of American films onto the
screens of a reconstructing Europe. But protests by many
national film industries brought about a wave of protectionist legislation in the form of quota and subsidy
systems, as well as the limiting of American earnings that
could be removed from certain countries. Hollywood
responded by making ‘‘runaway productions’’: films shot
abroad on cheaper locations with cheaper crews and
facilities, financed with the large revenues earned by
American exports but blocked from removal. Many of
the elaborate and expensive epics of this period—Quo
Vadis? (1951), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur
(1959), Cleopatra (1964)—are examples of this mode of
international production, which continues to this day
(especially in Australia and Canada, though without the
frozen earnings factor).
American firms also established studio subsidiaries in
almost every western European territory so as to be
eligible for government subsidies, with the bulk of
American overseas participation in the European film
industry in the 1960s centered in Great Britain, Italy,
and France. These and other European countries inaugurated treaty co-productions as a means for facing the
Hollywood threat head-on. On the one hand, the threat
was perceived as cultural, and so several European governments sought to protect national cinematic expression
through subsidies for quality or artistic films. On the
other hand, the threat was economic, so other subsidies
were created to support the more commercial side of
filmmaking. Co-production treaties between nations
were thus established as a means for maintaining standards of financing and participation for each nation’s film
industry (in order to qualify for state subsidies) while at
the same time allowing for increased resources and budgets available for film production (in order to expand
potential markets). The treaties specified how the financing would be handled, the nations and original languages
in which the films were shot, and the percentage of actors
and technical crew that must come from each participating nation. Treaty co-productions quickly became common practice in Europe beginning in the 1950s, though
the tension between the cultural and commercial needs
they were created to serve has continued to bedevil their
existence.
The first treaty was signed in October 1949 by
France and Italy, and it marks the beginning of a trend
in Franco-Italo co-production that hit its stride in the
late 1950s and peaked in the early- to mid-1960s.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, bilateral and trilateral
co-production treaties proliferated among more and
more national partners, extending beyond Europe to
include Canada, Latin America, and North Africa. The
films produced in this manner were broadly of three
types: art films, genre films, and quality entertainment
films. They constituted a sliding scale as regards budgets
and identifiable national characteristics, though all
allowed for financing increases of between one-and-onehalf and three times those of national productions. One
key factor for commercial success involved finding
formulae with the widest potential appeal across national
borders, and the most lucrative European co-productions
in the 1950s were those in the costume melodrama and
comedy genres. In the 1960s films were made across a
range of cycles, including pepla (muscleman mythological
epics), ‘‘spaghetti westerns,’’ ‘‘swashbuckler’’ movies, sex
comedies, horror films, and spy thrillers.
The rise of art cinema in this period highlights the
contradictions inherent in the co-production treaty strategy. Whereas European ‘‘quality’’ filmmaking represented the attempt to fight Hollywood cinema on its own terms (big budgets, star-studded casts, elaborate sets
and costumes), art cinema proceeded from the opposite
direction, and one connected to long-standing antiAmerican sentiment: that the strength of European
culture lies in its specific national artistic cultures.
While usually considered as exceptional examples of
auteurist films that represent their respective national
new waves, a high proportion of European art films in
this period were in fact international co-productions:
L’Anne ´e dernie `re a` Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad,
Alain Resnais, 1961); La Nuit Ame ´ricaine (Day for Night,
Franc¸ois Truffaut, 1973); all of the films of Michelangelo
Antonioni’s (b. 1912) tetralogy starring Monica Vitti
(1960–1964); all of Federico Fellini’s (1920–1993) films
from La Strada (The road, 1954) through Satyricon
(Fellini Satyricon, 1969); all of Luchino Visconti’s
(1906–1976) films from 1967 on; and most of the
1960s films directed by Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930),
Claude Chabrol (b. 1930), Vittorio De Sica (1902–
1974), and Bernardo Bertolucci (b. 1940), among many
others. Some art film co-productions at times acknowledge their status as such, and Godard is particularly
noteworthy in this respect—his 1963 film Le Me ´pris
(Contempt) takes as its subject the making of an AngloItalo-French co-production, which it itself is.
Several prominent film actors were in perpetual
migration across national borders to make co-productions of all sorts: Burt Lancaster and Charles Bronson
of the United States; Dirk Bogarde and Terence Stamp
of Great Britain; Anita Ekberg and Britt Ekland of
Sweden; Klaus Kinski and Elke Sommer of Germany;
Oskar Werner and Romy Schneider of Austria; Gina
Lollobrigida and Claudia Cardinale of Italy; and
Catherine Deneuve, Alain Delon, and Ge´rard
Depardieu of France. Their personal filmographies are
one register of the degree to which co-productions
became so important to international filmmaking in the
postwar era. Another, more direct, register is the national
filmographies of the nations that established co-production treaties in this period, though these are contradictory
and often difficult to decipher. Of the major film-producing European nations—Great Britain, France, Italy,
Spain, and West Germany—all but Great Britain
engaged consistently in treaty co-productions after
1950, and all made more co-productions in given years
in the mid-1960s than wholly national productions.
France’s co-productions between 1960 and 1972
exceeded completely French films by as a much as onethird.
As for Great Britain, its high production figures
obscure the degree to which US investment underwrote
the nation’s cinematic output in the 1960s, making it
difficult to define any part of the film industry as British
rather than Anglo-American. One of the key films of the
era, Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), was produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the first of a threepicture deal the famed Italian director made with the
Hollywood studio. Blow-Up is considered by film scholar
Peter Lev to be an example of the many ‘‘Euro-American
art films’’ made from the early 1960s on that combine
American and European approaches to filmmaking in
terms of film form, budgeting, finance, and language.
Such hybrid films evidence the balancing act engaged by
the international film industries in a postwar market
characterized by increased competition and innovation.
International co-productions thus represent in this
period, as they had in the interwar era and continue to
do so today, a series of complex actions and reactions to
Hollywood’s global ambitions.