Art Cinema

I

Introduction

Art Cinema, adaptation of the American term “art house”, applied to films shown in cinemas that specialize in classic revivals and serious, consciously intellectual cinema. “Art cinema”, as a term, is closely associated with the development of media studies in universities; “films” are seen as distinct from “movies”, the latter being a marketable, commercial product with broad appeal, the former being less expensively made, having lower production values, and being more intellectually challenging.

Financial distinctions, however, are not absolute, and commercial films—such as The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), directed by Anthony Mann, and Hello Dolly! (1969), directed by Gene Kelly—can fail disastrously at the box office, while uncommercial subjects, Otto e Mezzo (1963; 8y), directed by Federico Fellini, and Land and Freedom (1995), directed by Ken Loach, may be commercially successful.

The distinction between commercial and art cinema is also one of scale. In the United Kingdom, for example, while there may be as many as 50 theatrical prints of a commercial film in distribution, there will be only a handful of prints for one intended for the specialist film theatres. The production costs for art films are seldom as high as for those in mainstream cinema and the profits rarely as great; on the other hand, the losses are consequently smaller and, over a period of time, an art film can enjoy a long run in a small cinema with good financial results. Even so, it may have difficulty in finding its audience. If an art film is launched, unceremoniously, in a grand commercial cinema, while it may attract a respectably sized audience, it may also play to a half-empty house and may be taken off within days or weeks. Such a misjudgement destroyed the possibilities for both Zabriskie Point (1969), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, and Comrades (1987), directed by Bill Douglas. The former failed in the massive Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) cinemas; the latter attracted enthusiastic audiences, but only briefly. Had they been shown in smaller houses and received “favourable word of mouth”, a film’s strongest recommendation, they may well have become financially successful.

The commercial cinema of one country may produce the art house films of another; the films of the French New Wave directors—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and others—whose films opened in major cinemas in Paris, found respectable audiences abroad with films such as À Bout de Souffle (1960; Breathless), Jules et Jim (1961), and Le Boucher (1969), but only in specialist cinemas. The unfamiliarity of the subject material, the dislike of subtitles, and the freshness of style made them of minority interest. Schichinin no Samurai (1954; The Seven Samurai) directed by Akira Kurosawa, was a huge success in Japan—it was only a succès d’estime when shown with subtitles to audiences abroad. The same story, recast as the Western The Magnificent Seven (1960), directed by John Sturges, with an American cast, became a commercial, mainstream success.

II

History

The distinction between the art film and the movie, although culturally determined, is a valuable one. The stimulus to its distinction was the Russian Revolution in 1917 when, because of the shortage of raw film stock, serious film study can be said to have begun. Prints of American films, such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), directed by D. W. Griffith, were dismantled to be reassembled in a different sequence, and film analysis took place with chalk and blackboard. The art house movement began soon after, in France. In Paris in the early 1920s clubs such as the short-lived Friends of the Seventh Art and the Ciné Club were formed, the latter by the film director Louis Delluc in 1924. In the same year, the first regular film society, The Free Tribune of Cinema, was launched, and the small Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, which soon developed an international reputation, was converted to a specialized cinema.

In the United Kingdom, a growing interest in the film as art encouraged even commercial cinemas to show foreign films and, for two years, one London cinema devoted itself to German films—Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924; Waxworks), directed by Paul Leni, Die Niebelungen (1924), directed by Fritz Lang, and Der Letzte Mann (1924; The Last Laugh), directed by F. W. Murnau, among them. Inspired by these developments, Ivor Montagu and Hugh Miller started the Film Society in London. Its influence was extensive, and its founder members included such figures as John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, J. B. S. Haldane, and H. G. Wells. Apart from screening, for the first time in the country, now-obvious classics such as Bronenosets Potemkin (1925; The Battleship Potemkin), directed by Sergey Eisenstein, it showed two opposing versions of the Abyssinian campaign waged by Mussolini, one from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the other from Italy, alternating the films, reel by reel, so that the audience could make comparisons. Within a few years the first Scottish Film Society was started in Glasgow. Such beginnings are the foundations of film study throughout Europe. In the United States, Symon Gould, who founded the International Film Arts Cinema Guild in 1925, and Michel Midlin showed both Hollywood “oldies” and foreign films in the Guild’s cinema and elsewhere, but, as commercial enterprises, they only survived a few years. It was not until 1947, when the Austrian-born Amos Vogel started Cinema 16 in New York, that experimental and foreign films again had a public outlet. It led to the formation of a number of art houses and societies, among them the Berkeley Cinema Guild in California.

Out of these emerged film archives, funded not for commercial reasons, but to preserve the “art of the film”, the first of which was the National Film Library (later the National Film Archive) in the United Kingdom. Such bodies are now worldwide: George Eastman House, The Library of Congress, and the Museum of Modern Art, in the United States; Gosfilmofond in Russia; and the National Film Archive in Egypt are just a few examples. They make films, some of which are lost in their own countries, available to other archives and supply prints to television companies. Above all, they restore and maintain prints of films which, left to commercial interests alone, would disappear, and make them available for exhibition in specialized film theatres such as the National Film Theatre (London), the Cinématheque Française (Paris), and the Arsenal Kino (Berlin).

III

The Films

Broadly speaking, art cinema films are more personal and more demanding than mainstream popular films, in which innovation is frequently associated with the use of technology. The narrative of the Hollywood movie is usually the result of teamwork, often by many writers who have meticulously planned the story, its high points, variations, and resolution. Such films are traditionally associated more with their producers than with their directors and are frequently seamless and devoid of character. The director or writer may contribute a personal perspective, but it is firmly delimited by commercial considerations.

Such films may, however, replace obvious art house films in the canon of film study. The works of genre directors such as Howard Hawks, Josef von Sternberg, or Ernst Lubitsch are now appreciated for values that were not apparent to contemporary audiences, as personal expressions, albeit with commercial constraints. When they are screened, it is normally in seasons of their films, or in contexts that contribute to their being more fully appreciated, within specialist cinemas. The film director and actor Woody Allen, in a key moment of Annie Hall (1977), makes great fun of such audiences, when he and Annie are queuing to see a characteristic art house film, Le Chagrin et la Pitié (1971; The Sorrow and the Pity), directed by Marcel Ophuls. A subtitled documentary, it deals with major political and social events, worthy of the attention of high-brow New Yorkers. Overhearing a teacher of media studies behind them sounding off about the mannerisms of Fellini, Allen turns the tables. The “culturologist” Marshall McLuhan, who happens to be standing nearby, is brought in to put him in his place. It is a daring joke at the expense of such figures, even of the kind of audience that attends Allen’s own films. Similarly, the film critic Pauline Kael, while generally admiring L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961; Last Year in Marienbad), directed by Alain Resnais, described it as an “elaborate masochistic fantasy for intellectuals”.

Art house audiences appropriate the cinemas of other countries, and their seemingly modish appetites can be both insatiable and quickly satiated. Such tastes are not always filmic; rather, they form part of a set of wider cultural concerns that are not, necessarily, those of a film’s home country and can, consequently, rescue a film from oblivion. Roma, Citta Aperta (1945; Rome, Open City), directed by Roberto Rossellini, one of the icon films of Italian Neo-Realism, failed with critics in Italy and also at the 1946 Cannes film festival. When, shortly afterwards, it opened in Paris, however, its low technical standards and use of non-professional actors, both of which had counted against it in Italy, were perceived as virtues. The film’s clichéd plot was seen as less important than its eschewing of false heroics; its “grainy” quality was seen to give it a feeling of immediacy; its association with members of the resistance provided it with a sense of authenticity. Its reputation preceded it in the United States, where its success enabled its distributor, Rod Geiger, to back Rossellini’s next film, Paisà (1946).

The influence of Italian Neo-Realism is extensive. Both Bimal Roy and the Bengali film director Satyajit Ray are among its children. The former’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953; Two Acres of Land) brings to Indian cinema, through the story of a Bengali peasant farmer, a despairing analysis of the ways in which man struggles to achieve dignity in the face of moneylenders and drought. Its universal theme stands alongside those of films from the United States, such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940, John Ford) and The Southerner (1945, Jean Renoir), even, with a different emphasis, the Japanese film Ugetsu Monogatari (1953, Kenji Mizoguchi), but it was not seen abroad. Ray, on the other hand, with little film experience and the most simple of styles, was immediately recognized as one of the world’s master directors with the Apu trilogy (1955-1959). His influences—among them, Jean Renoir, whom he assisted on The River (1951), and Vittorio De Sica, with Ladri di Biciclette (1948; Bicycle Thieves)—left him open to the accusation of courting Western approval. He countered this charge by pointing to the incomprehensibility of the Bengali language and culture, with its values and myths, to most of his non-Indian admirers. Nevertheless, Ray’s later work, the ambitious Charulata (1964; The Lonely Wife) and his first non-Bengali film Shatranj ke Khilari (1977; The Chess Players), for example, were discussed in terms of Western literature. When such films find audiences abroad, their directors are often accused of cultural betrayal, of pandering to alien cultures, but it is difficult to see why films that have no appeal to cultured foreign audiences should be considered more authentic.

Latin American art cinema has similarly been inspired by Neo-Realism. Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson, the Argentine director, for example, was “discovered” at the Cannes film festival with La Casa del Ángel (1957; The House of the Angel). His world is one of constant interruption, disturbing sexuality, haunting memory, and religious prejudice. The domestic market for Torre-Nilsson’s films was small and, after La Caída (1959; The Fall), the notoriously fickle art-house audiences abroad, on which his films depended, were unresponsive.

Such “arty” films, even more than their audiences, are easy to ridicule, yet the art film includes all the masterpieces of cinema, as well as many that will disappear into history as their novelty fades. The best retain their originality, withstand continued re-evaluation, and coexist alongside those contemporary films that explore similar themes. Hence a film such as La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928; The Passion of Joan of Arc), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, which on its release was written off in Variety as a “deadly tiresome picture… not worth a dollar to any commercial picture theatre in the US”, remains an archetypal art film alongside which the films of Robert Bresson can be considered, and to which Jean-Luc Godard can refer in Une Femme Mariée (1964; A Married Woman) without affectation. Some, such as the silent films of Germany in the 1920s—Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (1919; The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), Hintertreppe (1921; Backstairs), and Der Letzte Mann—were collaborations between the screenwriter Carl Mayer and directors such as Robert Wiene, Leopold Jessner, and F. W. Murnau, working in creative partnership. Seen today, they are both documents from the past and stories for our time. Resnais has worked similarly with writers such as Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Semprun, and David Mercer, all eminent novelists and playwrights. The task of creating a film that transmits the sense and complexity of their work is not simply one for Alain Resnais, however, for the interpreters of meaning are members of the audience itself, who engage with and explore fresh approaches to the use of film. They recognize that cinema is more than pure entertainment; that it deals with the wider moral, philosophical, and social debates of society.

In the 1970s, German cinema held the centre stage, with film-makers such as Jean-Marie Straub, Alexander Kluge, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, and, especially, Rainer Fassbinder. With a series of films that included Angst Essen Seele Auf (1973; Fear Eats the Soul), Fontane Effi Briest (1974), and Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1978; The Marriage of Maria Braun), Fassbinder tacked the subjects of racism, sexuality, women’s rights, and social politics to the screen in new, challenging, and frequently visually innovative ways. Also widely seen—although probably more on television than in cinemas—was the intimate Edgar Reitz epic Heimat (1984), which followed the fortunes of one small-town German family from 1919 to 1982. Reitz followed up with two sequels, Die Zweite Heimat (1992) and Heimat 3 (2004), but these made less impact. By this stage, following Fassbinder's death and less compelling work from Wenders and Herzog, international interest had switched away from Germany.

Attention also focused on Spain where, after the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975, a social and cultural renaissance transformed the country. Directors such as Carlos Saura (La Caza/The Hunt, 1965; Cría Cuervos/Raise Ravens, 1975) and Victor Erice (El Espíritu de la Colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973), who had made coded anti-Francoist films under the dictatorship, seemed almost dazed by their new-found freedom, and it fell to the much younger Pedro Almodóvar to spearhead the new Spanish cinema. Irreverent and iconoclastic, Almodóvar's films gleefully shattered sexual and religious taboos, often foregrounding women's experience, among them Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios (1988; Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), ¡Átame! (1990; Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!), Todo Sobre Mi Madre (1999; All About My Mother), and La Mala Educación (2004; Bad Education). No less audacious, but with a more poetic, surrealist vision of the world, is the Basque film-maker Julio Medem, who made his debut with Vacas (1992; Cows) and went on to develop his quirky, playful style in such films as Los Amantes del Círculo Polar (1998; Lovers of the Arctic Circle) and Lucía y el Sexo (2003; Sex and Lucia).

Some of the most important European films of the 1990s were from France, La Reine Margot (1994, Patrice Chéreau), Ridicule (1996, Patrice Leconte), and Un Héros Très Discret (1996; A Self Made Hero, Jacques Audiard) among them. Set in France—respectively in 1572 at the time of the St Bartholemew's Day Massacre, in the 1780s in the court of Louis XVI, and immediately after World War II—they nevertheless relate strongly to the more recent past and the ways in which France sees its role in modern Europe. La Reine Margot, which is an international co-production, explores the tensions and complexities of attempting to unite nations with different cultural histories and religions; Ridicule looks at the authority of language to exert power across classes and nations, and Un Héros Très Discret reflects on the myths and fabrications of a heroic French resistance during the German occupation of 1940-1944.

In the 1990s, with the exception of Spain and—as always—France, art-house audiences started looking away from Europe generally, turning their gaze further afield, to Asia and Latin America. The rise of Iranian cinema, spearheaded by Dariush Mehrjui with The Cow (1970), gained international acclaim in the 1980s and 1990s with the films of Abbas Kiarostami, most notably his “Koker trilogy” of Where Is the Friend's House? (1987), And Life Goes On (1992), and Through the Olive Trees (1994). Criticism of Iran's theocratic rulers is oblique and veiled in Kiarostami's films, but more overt in the work of his contemporary Mohsen Makhmalbaf (A Time for Love, 1991; Gabbeh, 1996; Kandahar, 2001). Makhmalbaf's film-making activities have become a family concern, with his daughters Samira (The Apple, 1998; Blackboards, 2000) and Hana (Joy of Madness, 2003), and his wife Marziyeh Meshkini (2003; The Day I Became a Woman) turning directors in their own right. Other Iranian directors whose view of their country has troubled the censors include Jafar Panahi (The Circle, 2000; Offside, 2006) and Tahmineh Milani (The Hidden Half, 2001).

Recent years have also seen the revitalization of Latin American cinema, with exceptional work coming from Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. The Mexican directors Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, 1993; Pan's Labyrinth, 2006), Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mama También/And Your Mother Too, 2001), and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 2000) have successfully preserved their Hispanic base and art-house appeal while also diversifying into big-budget English-language films. In Brazil, Walter Salles made his international breakthrough with Central do Brasil (1998; Central Station) and consolidated his status with Diarios de Motocicleta (2004; The Motorcycle Diaries), about the political awakening of the young Che Guevara; while Fernando Meirelles brought a harsh documentary intensity to Cidade de Deus (2002; City of God), exploring the violence-ridden world of Rio street-gangs. With Nueve Reinas (2000; Nine Queens), Fabián Bielinsky aptly set his twisty tale of confidence tricksters against the background of Argentina's financial meltdown.

Besides these, recent art-house trends have included the cycle of creepy Japanese ghost stories kickstarted by Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998; The Ring) and the elevation of the once-despised martial-arts movie to high-production-value status pioneered by Ang Lee's Wo Hu Zang Long (2000; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and eagerly emulated by Zhang Yimou in Ying Xiong (2002; Hero) and Shi Mian Mai Fu (2004; House of Flying Daggers). In terms of national origin, style, genre, and political stance the range of films currently available to art-house audiences has never been wider, allowing those audiences to recognize that forms of visual representation are ideologically created, and that film form is not static but constantly changing in unexpected ways.