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An
art film (also called an “art cinema”, “art movie”, or in the U.S., an "
independent film" or “art house film”) is a typically serious, noncommercial,
independently made film that's aimed at a
niche audience, rather than a
mass audience. Film critics and
film studies scholars typically define an “art film” using a “...canon of films and those formal qualities that mark them as different from mainstream Hollywood films.”
Art film producers usually present their films at specialty theatres (
repertory cinemas, or in the US "arthouse cinemas") and
film festivals. The term "art film" is much more widely used in the
United States than in Europe, where the term "art film" is more associated with
"auteur" films and "
national cinema" (for example, German national cinema).
Art films are aimed at small
niche market audiences, which means they can rarely get the financial backing which will permit large production budgets, expensive
special effects, costly
celebrity actors, and huge advertising campaigns, as are used in
widely-released mainstream
blockbuster films.
Art film directors make up for these constraints by creating a different type of film, which typically uses lesser-known film actors (or even amateur actors) and modest sets to make films which focus on reflective dialogue sequences. For promotion, art films rely on the publicity generated from film critics' reviews, discussion of their film by arts columnists, commentators, and
bloggers, and "word-of-mouth" promotion by audience members. Since art films have small initial investment costs, they only need to appeal to a small portion of the
mainstream viewing audiences to become financially viable.
History of "art film"
The antecedents of art films included
D. W. Griffith's film
Intolerance (1916) and
Sergei Eisenstein's films. Art films were also influenced by films by Spanish avant-garde creators such as
Luis Buñuel and
Salvador Dalí (for example,
L'Age d'Or from 1930) and
Jean Cocteau (for example,
The Blood of a Poet, also from 1930). In the 1920s, film societies began advocating the notion that films could be divided into an "...entertainment cinema directed towards a mass audience and a serious art cinema aimed at an intellectual audience". In England,
Alfred Hitchcock and
Ivor Montagu formed a Film Society and imported films that they thought were "artistic achievements," such as "Soviet films of dialectical montage, and the expressionist films of the Universum Film A. G. (UFA) studios in Germany."
Cinéma Pur, a 1920s and 1930s French
avant-garde film movement also influenced the development of the idea of "art film." The cinema pur film movement included
Dada artists, such as
Man Ray (
Emak-Bakia,
Return to Reason),
Rene Clair (
Entr'acte), and
Marcel Duchamp (
Anemic Cinema). The Dadaists used film to overturn traditional narrative techniques and bourgeois conventions, and conventional Aristotelian notions of time and space by creating a flexible montage of time and space. Pure Cinema was influenced by such German "absolute" filmmakers as
Hans Richter,
Walter Ruttmann, and
Viking Eggeling.
In the 1930s and 1940s,
John Ford argued that Hollywood films could be divided into the "...artistic aspirations of literary adaptations like
Sean O'Casey's
The Informer (1935) and
Eugene O'Neill's
The Long Voyage Home (1940)", and the money-making "popular genre films" such as gangster thrillers. William Siska argues that Italian
neorealist films from the mid- to late-1940s, such as
Open City (1945),
Paisa (1946), and
The Bicycle Thief can be deemed as another "conscious art film movement".
In the late 1940s, the US public's perception that Italian neorealist films and other serious European fare were different from mainstream Hollywood films was reinforced by the development of "arthouse cinemas" in major US cities and college towns. After the Second World War, "...a growing segment of the American filmgoing public was wearying of mainstream Hollywood films," and they went to the newly-created art film theaters to see "...alternatives to the films playing in main-street movie palaces".
Films shown in these art cinemas included "... British, foreign-language, and independent American films, as well as documentaries and revivals of Hollywood classics." Films such as Rossellini's
Open City and Mackendrick's
Tight Little Island,
The Bicycle Thief and
The Red Shoes were shown to substantial US audiences.
The term "art film" is much more widely used in the
United States than in Europe. In the US, the term is often defined very broadly, to include foreign-language (non-English)
"auteur" films,
independent films,
experimental films, documentaries and short films. In the 1960s "art film" became a
euphemism in the US for racy Italian and French
B-movies. By the 1970s, the term was used to describe
sexually explicit European films with artistic pretensions such as
I Am Curious (Yellow). In the US, the term "art film" is sometimes used very loosely to refer to the broad range of films shown in repertory theaters or "arthouse cinemas." With this approach, a broad range of films, such as a 1960s
Hitchcock movie, a 1970s experimental underground film, a 1980s European auteur film, and a 1990s US "Independent" film all fall under the rubric of "art film."
By the 1980s and 1990s, the term became conflated with "
independent film" in the US, which shares many of the same stylistic traits with "art film." Companies such as
Miramax Films distributed
independent films which were deemed commercially unviable at the major studios. When major motion picture studios noted the niche appeal of independent films, they created special divisions dedicated to non-mainstream fare, such as the
Fox Searchlight division of
Twentieth Century Fox, the
Focus Features division of
Universal, and the
Sony Pictures Classics division of
Sony Pictures Entertainment. Film critics have debated whether the films from these special divisions can truly be considered to be "independent films", given that they've financial backing from major studios.
Deviations from mainstream film norms
Film scholar
David Bordwell outlined the academic definition of "art film" in a 1979 article entitled
The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice, which contrasts art films against the mainstream films of
classical Hollywood cinema. Mainstream Hollywood-style films use a clear
narrative form to organize the film into a series of "...causally related events taking place in space and time," with every scene driving towards a goal. The
plot for mainstream movies is driven by a well-defined protagonist, fleshed out with clear characters, and strengthened with "...question-and-answer logic, problem-solving routines, (and) deadline plot structures." The film is then tied together with fast pacing, musical soundtracks to cue the appropriate audience emotions, and tight, seamless
editing. Mainstream films tend to use a small palette of familiar, generic images, plots, verbal expressions, and
archetypal "stock" characters.
In contrast, Bordwell states that "...the art cinema motivates its narrative by two principles:
realism and authorial expressivity." Art films deviate from the mainstream, "classical" norms of filmmaking in that they typically deal with more episodic narrative structures with a "...loosening of the chain of cause and effect". As well, art films often deal with an inner drama that takes place in a character's psyche, such as psychological issues dealing with individual identity, transgressive sexual or social issues, moral dilemmas, or personal crises.
Mainstream films also deal with moral dilemmas or identity crises, but these issues are usually resolved by the end of the film. In art films, the dilemmas are probed and investigated in a pensive fashion, but usually without a clear resolution at the end of the movie. The protagonists in art films are often facing doubt, anomie or alienation, and the art film often depicts their internal dialogue of thoughts,
dream sequences, and fantasies. In some art films, the director uses a depiction of absurd or seemingly meaningless actions to express a philosophical viewpoint such as
existentialism.
The story in an art film often has a secondary role to character development and an exploration of ideas through lengthy sequences of dialogue. If an art film has a story, it's usually a drifting sequence of vaguely defined or ambiguous episodes. There may be unexplained gaps in the film, deliberately unclear sequences, or extraneous sequences that are not related to previous scenes, which force the viewer to subjectively make their own interpretation of the film's message. Art films often "...bear the marks of a distinctive visual style" and
authorial approach of the director. An art cinema film often refuses to provide a "...readily answered conclusion," instead putting to the cinema viewer the task of thinking about "...how is the story being told? Why tell the story in this way?"
Film theorist
Robert Stam argues that “art film” was a film genre based on artistic status, in the same way that film genres can be based on aspects of films such as their budgets (
blockbuster movies or
B-movies) or their star performers (Fred Astaire movies).
Timeline of notable films
The following list is a small, partial sample of films with "art film" qualities, compiled to give a general sense of what directors and films are considered to have "art film" characteristics. The films in this list demonstrate one or more of the characteristics of art films: a serious, noncommercial, or independently made film that isn't aimed at a mass audience. Some of the films on this list are also considered to be "auteur" films,
independent films, or
experimental films. In some cases, critics disagree over whether a film is mainstream or not. For example, while some critics called
Gus Van Sant's
My Own Private Idaho (1991) an "exercise in film experimentation" of "high artistic quality", the Washington Post called it an ambitious
mainstream film
Some films in this list have most of these characteristics; other films are commercially-made films produced by mainstream studios that nevertheless bear the hallmarks of a director's "auteur" style, or which have an experimental character. The films in this list are notable either because they won major awards or critical praise from influential film critics or because they introduced an innovative narrative or filmmaking technique. For example, Kurosawa's
Rashomon used an innovative narrative techique of showing the same events as witnessed by four different people.
1920s-1950s
In the 1920s and 1930s, filmmakers didn't set out to make "art films", and film critics didn't use the term "art film." However, there were films that had more sophisticated aesthetic objectives, such as
Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent film
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and surrealist film such as
Luis Buñuel's
Un chien andalou (1929) and
L'Âge d'Or (1930). In the late 1940s, UK director
Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressberger made
The Red Shoes (1948),
a film about ballet that stood out from mainstream genre films.
In the 1950s, some of the well-known films with artistic sensibilities include Federico Fellini's
La Strada (1954),
The Seventh Seal (1957) by
Ingmar Bergman
and
The 400 Blows (1959) by
François Truffaut. As well, less well-known films such as
A Generation,
Kanal,
Ashes and Diamonds,
Lotna (1954-1959), by
Andrzej Wajda showed the
Polish Film School style. In Asia, Indian director
Satyajit Ray's
The Apu Trilogy (1955–1960) tells the story of a poor country boy's growth to adulthood. Japanese directors produced a number of films that broke with convention.
Akira Kurosawa's
Rashomon (1950), depicts four witnesses' contradictory accounts of a rape and murder
Other Japanese films from this era include
Tokyo Story (1953) by
Yasujiro Ozu and
Ugetsu (1953) by
Kenji Mizoguchi.
1960s
The early 1960s saw the release of a number of groundbreaking films.
Jean-Luc Godard's
Breathless (1960) used innovative visual and editing techniques such as jump cuts and hand-held camera work.
Michelangelo Antonioni's
L'avventura from the same year is characterized by its slow pacing and unusual narrative structure.
Federico Fellini's seminal
8½ (1963) was an exploration of creative, marital and spiritual difficulties shot in a sumptuous black-and-white by Gianni de Venanzo.
(1968).]]
Robert Bresson's
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) is notable for its religious imagery, spiritual allegories, and naturalistic, minimalist style.
Luis Buñuel's
Belle de Jour (1967) shocked audiences with its masochistic fantasies about floggings and bondage. At the end of the decade,
Stanley Kubrick's (1968) wowed audiences with its scientific realism, pioneering use of special effects, and unusual visual imagery. In
Soviet Armenia,
Sergei Parajanov's
The Color of Pomegranates, which was banned by Soviet authorities, was praised by critic
Mikhail Vartanov as "revolutionary" and in the early 1980s,
Les Cahiers du Cinéma placed the film in its top 10 list. In Iran,
Dariush Mehrjui's
The Cow (1969), about a man who becomes insane after the death of his beloved cow, sparked the new wave of
Iranian cinema.
1970s
In the early 1970s, directors shocked audiences with violent films such as
Stanley Kubrick's
A Clockwork Orange (1971) and sexually-explicit and controversial films such as
Bernardo Bertolucci's
Last Tango in Paris (1972). Nevertheless, other directors did more introspective films, such as
Andrei Tarkovsky's meditative, weighty science fiction film
Solaris (1972) Another feature of 1970s art films was the prominence of bizarre characters and imagery, which abound in the tormented, obsessed title character in
German New Wave director
Werner Herzog's
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1973), and in
cult films such as
Alejandro Jodorowsky's psychedelic
The Holy Mountain (1973) about a footless, handless dwarf and an alchemist seeking the mythical Lotus Island The film
Taxi Driver (1976) by
Martin Scorsese continues the themes that
Clockwork Orange explored: an alienated population living in a violent, decaying society. The gritty violence and seething rage of Scorsese's film contrasts with
David Lynch's dreamlike, surreal
Eraserhead (1977).
1980s
In 1980, director
Martin Scorsese shocked audiences who had become used to the escapist blockbuster adventures of
Steven Spielberg and
George Lucas with the gritty, harsh realism of his film
Raging Bull.
Robert De Niro took method acting to an extreme to portray a boxer's decline from a prizewinning young fighter to an overweight has-been nightclub owner. Japanese director
Akira Kurosawa also used a realism approach to portray the brutal, bloody violence of Japanese samurai warfare of the 1500s in
Ran (1985).
Other directors in the 1980s chose a more intellectual path, exploring philosophical issues.
Andrzej Wajda's
Man of Iron (1981) is a critique of the Polish communist government which won the 1981 Palme d'or at the
Cannes Film Festival. Another Polish director,
Krzysztof Kieślowski released
The Decalogue in 1988, a meditative and melancholy film series that explores ethical issues and moral puzzles. The
cult film Pink Floyd The Wall (1982) explored political issues such as fascism and totalitarianism using the
progressive rock band
Pink Floyd's music and metaphorical images to spin a non-linear storyline.
Another approach used by directors in the 1980s was to create bizarre, surreal alternate worlds.
Martin Scorsese's
After Hours (1985) is a comedy thriller that depicts a man's baffling adventures in a surreal nighttime world of chance encounters with mysterious characters.
David Lynch's
Blue Velvet (1986), is a
film noir-style thriller mystery filled with symbolism and metaphors about polarized worlds and distorted characters that are hidden in the seamy underworld of a small town.
Peter Greenaway's
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) is an outlandish fantasy/
black comedy about
cannibalism and extreme violence with an intellectual theme: a critique of
elite culture in
Thatcherian Britain.
1990s
In the 1990s, some directors created bizarre, surreal alternate worlds, as was done in the 1980s with
Blue Velvet and
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. In 1990, Japanese director
Akira Kurosawa's
Dreams depicted his imaginative reveries in a series of vignettes that range from idyllic pastoral country landscapes to horrific visions of tormented demons and a blighted post-nuclear war landscape. In 1991, director
Joel Coen's
Barton Fink, which won the
Palme d'or at the
Cannes Film Festival, told an enigmatic story about a writer who encounters a range of bizarre characters including an alcoholic, abusive novelist and a serial killer.
David Lynch's 1997 film
Lost Highway is a psychological
thriller that explores fantasy worlds, bizarre time-space transformations, and mental breakdowns using surreal imagery.
Other directors in the 1990s explored philosophical issues and themes such as identity, chance, death, and existentialism. The 1990s films
My Own Private Idaho and
Chungking Express explored the theme of identity.
Gus Van Sant's
My Own Private Idaho (1991) is an independent road movie/buddy movie about two young street hustlers which explores the theme of the search for home and identity. It was called a "high-water mark in '90s independent film", a "stark, poetic rumination", and an "exercise in film experimentation" of "high artistic quality".
Wong Kar-wai's
Chungking Express (1994) explores the themes of identity, disconnection, loneliness, and isolation in the "metaphoric concrete jungle" of modern Hong Kong. The film uses a symbolism-imbued pop
music video-influenced visual style that uses a
French New Wave approach. While the
British Film Institute called it one of the best Asian films of contemporary cinema, it's considered to be a film for cineophiles, because it's "largely a cerebral experience" which you enjoy "because of what you know about film."
Several 1990s films explored existentialist-oriented themes related to life, chance, and death.
Robert Altman's 1993 film
Short Cuts (1993) explore themes of chance, death, and infidelity by tracing ten parallel and interwoven stories. The film, which won the Golden Lion and the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival, was called a "many-sided, many mooded, dazzlingly structured eclectic jazz mural" by Chicago Tribune critc Michael Wilmington.
Krzysztof Kieslowski's
Three Colors trilogy (1993-1994), which was co-written by
Krzysztof Piesiewicz, was called an exploration of "...unabashedly spiritual and existential issues" that created a "truly transcendent experience".
Matthew Barney's
The Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002) is a cycle of five symbolic, allegorical films that create a self-enclosed aesthetic system that aims to explore the process of creation. The films are filled with allusions to reproductive organs and sexual development, and they use narrative models drawn from biography, mythology, and geology.
Abbas Kiarostami's film
Taste of Cherry (1997) about a man trying to hire a person to bury him after he commits suicide is shot in a minimalist style, with long takes. The film won the Palme d'or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Some 1990s films mixed an ethereal or surreal visual atmosphere with the exploration of philosophical issues.
Krzysztof Kieslowski's
The Double Life of Véronique (1991) is a drama about the theme of identity and a political allegory about the East/West split in Europe which features stylized cinematography, an ethereal atmosphere, and unexplained supernatural elements.
Darren Aronofsky's film "
Pi" (1998) is a dream-like "...incredibly complex and ambiguous film filled with both incredible style and substance" about a paranoid math genius' "search for peace." The film creates a
David Lynch-inspired,"... eerie "
Eraserhead"-like world" shot in "black-and-white, which lends a dream-like atmosphere to all of the proceedings", which explore issues such as "metaphysics and spirituality"
2000s
A number of films from the 2000s with art film qualities were notable due to their use of innovative filmmaking or editing techniques.
Memento (2001), a psychological thriller directed by
Christopher Nolan is about a man suffering from short-term memory loss. The film is edited so that the plot is revealed backwards in ten-minute chunks, simulating the condition of memory loss.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) is a romance film directed by
Michel Gondry about a man who hires a company to erase the memory of a bad relationship. The film used a range of special effect techniques and camera work to depict the destruction of the man's memories and his transitions from one memory to another.
Timecode (2000), a film directed by
Mike Figgis, uses a split screen to show four continuous 90 minute takes that follow four storylines.
Russian Ark (2002), a film directed by
Alexander Sokurov took Figgis' use of extended takes even further; it's notable for being the first feature film shot in a single, unedited take.
Several 2000s-era films explored the theme of
amnesia or memory, but unlike
Memento, they did so using narrative techniques rather than filmmaking and editing methods.
Mulholland Drive (2001), directed by
David Lynch is about a freshly-moved girl in Hollywood who discovers an amnesiac in her house.
Oldboy (2003), directed by
Park Chan-wook, is about a man imprisoned by a mysterious captor for 15 years who must then chase his old memories when he's abruptly released.
Peppermint Candy (2000), directed by
Lee Chang-dong, starts with the suicide of the male protagonist, and then uses reverse chronology (like
Memento) to depict the events of the last 20 years which led the man to want to kill himself.
Waking Life (2001), an animated film directed by Richard Linklater uses an innovative digital
rotoscope technique to depict a young man stuck in a dream. Other films include
Pan's Labyrinth (2006), a fantasy/war film directed by
Guillermo del Toro about a girl who discovers a magical labyrinth of bizarre creatures, and
The Science of Sleep (2006), a fantasy written and directed by Michel Gondry.
Some of the notable films from the 2000s that have been considered to have art film-qualities differed from mainstream films in controversial subject matter or in narrative form. Elephant (2003), a film directed by Gus Van Sant, for example, depicting mass murder at a high school that echoed the Columbine High School massacre, won top prize at the Cannes Film Festival More recently, Todd Haynes' complex deconstruction of Bob Dylan's persona, I'm Not There (2007), was favored by film critics, while the less well-received Southland Tales earned comparisons to Godard in its bizarre political focus and departure from narrative conventions.
Related concepts
Art television
A genre or style of "art television" has been identified, which shares some of the same traits of art films. Television shows such as David Lynch's Twin Peaks series and BBC's The Singing Detective also have "...a loosening of causality, a greater emphasis on psychological or anecdotal realism, violations of classical clarity of space and time, explicit authorial comment, and ambiguity." Other television shows that have been called "art television," such as The Simpsons, use a "...flurry of cultural references, intentionally inconsistent characterization, and considerable self-reflexivity about television conventions and the status of the programme as a television show."
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