VI.

Film Art

At the beginning of the nickelodeon period various authors began to write about the cinema as a new art form, rather than as an interesting technical novelty. In France, in 1908, a new company called Film d’Art began production with L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (The Assassination of the Duc de Guise), under a programme using artistically recognized writers, musicians, and actors, with a special theory about how films should be acted. This impressed film-makers even in the United States, and eventually led to the creation by the film industry of a special category of films called art films. (This description is still used today for films of higher artistic intent, made on lower budgets for the minority audience that will appreciate them.) In the nickelodeon period, films from Italy as well as France showed an influence from the middlebrow or Salon Art of the time, particularly in set design and staging.