Art Cinema

ART CINEMA AND AUDIENCE

In addition to different textual qualities, art films were characteristically screened in venues other than the commercial cinema circuits. The 1920s saw the development of a range of different and separate exhibition venues, for example, cinema clubs, film societies, and dedicated

repertory cinemas. France was central to this trend with the ciné club movement, and although Britain did not contribute much in the way of films to the new art cinema, it was prominent in the development of alternative exhibition venues with the establishment of the Film Society in London in 1925. In America, some art films were imported in the 1920s, and there were attempts to establish art cinemas. Among the proponents were Symon Gould's International Film Arts Guild, which organized foreign film screenings in New York and Philadelphia, and the club network of the Amateur Cinema League. These distribution methods led to what became known as "the little-cinema movement."

In America after World War II emerged a small but perceptible art house segment that screened foreign, particularly European films, and by 1950 it registered sufficiently in the industry to be included as a specific listing in the Film Daily Year Book. Though such cinemas screened the now-acknowledged early classics of art film by Rossellini and De Sica, they also played host, for example, to a variety of British films, including Laurence Olivier's (1907–1989) Shakespeare films, Henry V (1945) and Hamlet (1948), The Red Shoes (1948) by Michael Powell (1905–1990) and Emeric Pressburger (1902–1988), The Fallen Idol (1948) by Carol Reed (1906–1976), and Ealing comedies, for example, Tight Little Island (Whisky Galore!, 1949). As the juxtaposition of a Rossellini film and an Ealing comedy suggests, the films screened in art cinemas in both the United States and Britain ranged beyond the restricted definition of the art film to incorporate foreign films of various kinds. A rounded picture of the art film of the postwar period based upon the exhibition dimension could also include a number of other filmmakers and works: for example, the Spanish director, Luis Buñuel's films Viridiana (1961) and Belle de jour (1965) and the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini's (1922–1975) Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964) and Teorema (Theorem, 1968). They also include works by the Japanese filmmakers Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998), Kenji Mizoguchi (1898–1956), and Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963); the Indian director Satyajit Ray (1921–1992); and the Polish director Andrzej Wajda (b. 1926), creator of the war trilogy Pokoleni (A Generation, 1955), Kanal (1957), and Popiól diament (Ashes and Diamonds, 1958). There were also a number of "new waves" including young filmmakers from Central Europe such as Miloš Forman (b. 1932), Vĕra Chytilová (b. 1929), and Jiří Menzel (b. 1938) from the former Czechoslovakia, Miklós Jancsó (b. 1921) from Hungary, Jerzy Skolimowski (b. 1938) and Roman Polański (b. 1933) from Poland, and Dušan Makavejev (b. 1932) from the former Yugoslavia. In addition, there were the politically conscious films of Latin American directors such as the Brazilian Glauber Rocha (1938–1981) and Fernando Solanas (b. 1936) from Argentina. British filmmakers, including Karel Reisz (1926–2002) and Lindsay Anderson (1923–1994), created such films as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), This Sporting Life (1963); Tony Richardson (1928–1991) made Tom Jones (1963), and the British work of the American Joseph Losey (1909–1984), particularly The Servant (1963) and Accident (1968), though circulating as mainstream films in their home country, tended to be regarded as art films when screened abroad. There was also a belated resurgence of postwar German cinema with the emergence of such directors as Alexander Kluge (b. 1932), Volker Schlöndorff (b. 1939), Werner Herzog (b. 1942), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982).

This heterogeneous array of films became familiar elements of minority cinema during the 1950s and 1960s, sharing the specialized art cinema exhibition space with the iconic art films from France and Italy. Also during this period, the film festival became an important means of publicizing art films to an international audience and ensuring their circulation through the art cinema circuits in the United States and Britain. The most prestigious, the Venice and Cannes festivals, both originated in the 1930s, though the Cannes Film Festival did not truly begin until 1946; subsequently, they were joined by a range of venues in Britain and other European countries (Edinburgh, Berlin, Barcelona, and London), the United States (San Francisco, New York), and Australia (Melbourne, Sidney).