Information about Art Film

An art film (also called an “art cinema”, “art movie”, or in the US, an "independent film" or “art house film”) is a typically serious, noncommercial, independently made film that is aimed at a niche audience, rather than a mass audience.^[1] 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.”^[2] 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" (e.g., 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.^[3] Art films were also influenced by films by Spanish avant-garde creators such as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí (e.g., L'Age d'Or from 1930) and Jean Cocteau (e.g., 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."^[4]

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."^[5]

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".^[6] 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.^[7]

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 have 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.^[8] 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".^[9] 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.^[10] The protagonists in art films are often facing doubt, anomie or alienation, and the art film often depicts their internal dialogue of thoughts, dreams, 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 is 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.^[11] An art cinema films often refuse to provide a "...readily answered conclusion," instead putting the audience member the task of thinking about "...how is the story being told? Why tell the story in this way?"^[12]

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).^[13]

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 is not 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^[14]

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 shows the same events as witnessed by four different people.

1920s-1950s

In the 1920s and 1930s, filmmakers did not set out to make "art films", and film critics did not 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 The Seventh Seal (1957) by Ingmar Bergman ^[15] 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^[16] 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 notable for its slow pacing and unusual narrative structure. Other films by Antonioni from the 1960s include L'eclisse (1962), about a young woman who is unable to form a solid relationship her boyfriend because of his materialistic nature; and Blowup (1966), a film about a photographer's involvement in a murder case which was his first English-language movie. Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) was a black and white exploration of creative and marital difficulties.^[17]

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, the genius Sergei Parajanov, created The Color of Pomegranates, a film filled with fantasy, beauty and artistry. 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)^[18] 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^[19]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 DeNiro 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 film gay road movie/buddy movie about two young street hustlers which explored the theme of the search for home and identity. It was called a "high-water mark in '90s independent film"^[20], a "stark, poetic rumination"^[21], and an "exercise in film experimentation"^[22] of "high artistic quality"^[23]. Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express (1994) ^[24] 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 visual style influenced by the French New Wave. While the British Film Institute called it one of the best Asian films of contemporary cinema, it is considered to be a film for cineophiles, because it is "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"^[25] that created a "truly transcendent experience" ^[26].

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)^[27] 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." ^[28] The film creates a David Lynch-inspired,"... eerie "Eraserhead"-like world"^[29] shot in "black-and-white, which lends a dream-like atmosphere to all of the proceedings", which explore issues such as "metaphysics and spirituality" ^[30]

2000s

• The Circle (2000), a drama film directed by Jafar Panahi.
• Peppermint Candy (2000), a film directed by Lee Chang-dong
• In the Mood for Love (2000), a film written and directed by Wong Kar-wai.
• Timecode (film) (2000), a film directed by Mike Figgis, following four storylines simultaneously.
• Waking Life (2001), a digitally rotoscoped and animated film directed by Richard Linklater about a young man stuck in a dream. ^[31]
• Memento (2001), a psychological thriller directed by Christopher Nolan about murder at the hands of a man suffering from long-term memory loss--hence the plot is revealed backwards and in ten-minute chunks
• Mulholland Drive (2001), a film directed by David Lynch spinning a tale about a freshly-moved girl in Hollywood who discovers an amnesiac in her house.
• Donnie Darko (2001), a film directed by Richard Kelly.
• Russian Ark (2002), a film directed by Alexander Sokurov, notable for being the first feature film shot in a single, unedited take.
• Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), a film directed by Park Chan-wook.
• Dolls (2002), a film directed by Takeshi Kitano.
• Oldboy (2003), a film directed by Park Chan-wook.
• Suite Habana (2003), a documentary film by Fernando Pérez, filmed with fictional cinema techniques.
• Lost in Translation (2003), a film directed by Sofia Coppola.
• Elephant (2003), a film directed by Gus Van Sant
• The Company (2003), a film directed by Robert Altman.
• Before Sunset (2004), the sequel to Before Sunrise, filmed in real time
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), a romance film directed by Michel Gondry about a man who hires a company to erase the memory of a relationship gone bad.
• Tropical Malady (2004), a Thai romance and psychological drama film directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
• 2046 (2004), a drama film written and directed by Wong Kar-wai.
• Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), a film directed by Park Chan-wook
• Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), part of a nine-part series directed by Matthew Barney.
• Brokeback Mountain (2005), a film about two male ranch hands between whom an illicit romance blooms. Directed by Ang Lee (Academy Award-winning film)
• Babel (2006), a film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu about four different people whose tragic lives (and themes of their stories) intertwine.
• Just Like the Son (2006), a film written and directed by Morgan J. Freeman, starring Mark Webber, Brendan Sexton III, and Rosie Perez.
• Pan's Labyrinth (2006), a fantasy/war film directed by Guillermo del Toro about a girl of modest nobility who discovers a magical labyrinth behind the mansion in which she hides during the Spanish civil war.
• The Science of Sleep (2006), a fantasy film, written and directed by Michel Gondry.''
• Triad Election (aka Election 2 ) (2006), a crime thriller directed by Johnnie To about a gangster who trys to escape the Triads.
• Imagination (2007), a fantasy film about "twin girls who overcome physical limitations to learn the secrets of heaven and nature", written and directed by Eric Leiser.
• The Fountain (2006), A non-linear story about a man who longs for the cure for death directed by Darren Aronofsky.

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."^[32]

See also

• Experimental film
• Auteur theory
• Film genres
• Independent Spirit Award
• Sundance Film Festival
• Independent Film Channel
• Documentary films
• List of directors associated with art film

References