Cinema art.

An art film (also known as art movie, specialty film, art house film, or in the collective sense asart cinema) is typically a serious, independent filmaimed at a niche market rather than a mass marketaudience.^[1] An art film is "intended to be a serious artistic work, often experimental and not designed for mass appeal";^[2] they are "made primarily for aesthetic reasons rather than commercial profit",^[3]and they contain "unconventional or highly symbolic content".^[4]

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",^[5] which includes, among other elements: a social realism style; an emphasis on the authorial expressiveness of the director; and a focus on the thoughts and dreams of characters, rather than presenting a clear, goal-driven story. Film scholar David Bordwell claims that "art cinema itself is a film genre, with its own distinct conventions".^[6]

Art film producers usually present their films at specialty theatres (repertory cinemas, or, in the U.S., "arthouse cinemas") and film festivals. The term art film is much more widely used in the United States, the UK and Australia than in Europe, where the term 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 that will permit large production budgets, expensive special effects, costlycelebrity actors, or huge advertising campaigns, as are used in widely releasedmainstream 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 that focus much more on developing ideas or exploring new narrative techniques or film-making conventions.

Furthermore, a certain degree of experience and knowledge are required to understand or appreciate such films; one mid-1990s art film was called "largely a cerebral experience" that one enjoys "because of what you know about film".^[7] This contrasts sharply with mainstream "blockbuster" films, which are geared more towards escapism and pure entertainment. 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.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1177