Art Cinema



RESTRICTED DEFINITIONS

The demise of the art film in the 1930s is often attributed to the advent of the sound picture, which escalated production costs and fostered a conventional approach to narrative and representation. Yet it has been suggested that some strands of the cinema of the period do bear the marks of art cinema in some respects. For instance, the state-sponsored documentary film supervised by John Grierson (1898–1972) has been proposed as Britain's art cinema, the drab though realist subject matter and the often innovative form of the films differentiating them from the escapist Hollywood cinema that dominated British screens; similarly, it is argued that the poetic realist films from the French cinema with their gloomy narratives culminating in the death of the hero as in Marcel Carné's (1909–1996) Quai des brumes ( Port of Shadows , 1938) and Le Jour se lève ( Daybreak , 1939) offer a different, more downbeat experience compared to the American films with their characteristically optimistic endings. Yet, these arguable instances apart, the renewal of the art impulse in film did not occur in a significant sense until the 1940s, with the key films once again coming from European industries engaged in a postwar rebuilding process. Italy played a major role with neo-realist films, such as Roma città aperta ( Open City , 1945) by Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977) and Ladri di biciclette ( The Bicycle Thieves , 1948) by Vittoria de Sica (1902–1974), and the success of such films in America paved the way for the development of the specialized exhibition venue—the art house, the "sure seater"—in the large cities and university towns.

There were a number of reasons for the increased prospects for foreign films in the American market in the late 1940s. These range from reduced production levels at the Hollywood studios, which created gaps in the market; concerted efforts by the British, Italian, and French industries to distribute their films in the United States; the move toward "runaway production" by American companies, which gave the majors an investment stake in British, French, and Italian films; the changing composition of the audience from a family one increasingly catered to by television to one dominated by young people; and an interest in European culture among the returning service personnel who had spent some time in England, France, and Italy during the war. It has also been suggested that the changing audience tastes consequent upon the demographic shift went in the direction of films with mature, adult, serious thematic concerns, qualities that were to be found in the new European films.

One adult dimension of the foreign film, which became an important marketing feature, was the liberal approach to the representation of sexuality. This became more marked with foreign films from outside of the "art" sector, such as Et Dieu … créa la femme ( And God Created Woman , 1956) and the phenomenon of the actress Brigitte Bardot (b. 1934), but prior to that even a serious political narrative such as Rossellini's Open City was marketed in the United States with one eye on the hints of lesbianism and drug use in the film. In this respect, the art cinema was an important agent in the erosion of the careful censorship of films in America. Indeed, a court case involving a segment of the 1948 Italian film L'Amore known as The Miracle , prompted the US Supreme Court to issue a landmark judgement in 1952 that conferred upon films the constitutional guarantees that already protected freedom of speech and the free press. By the early 1960s Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960), a classic art film, had an American trailer that simply featured the film's sex scenes with a voice-over acclaiming the film as "a new experience in motion picture eroticism."

This period saw the formation of art cinema in its most prominent connotation—the restricted sense—with the directorial debuts of a number of the key directors and the emergence of some of the key actors identified with the art film. Robert Bresson (1901–1999), Luchino Visconti (1906–1976), and Ingmar Bergman made their first features in the 1940s, followed by Federico Fellini (who had worked with Rossellini) and Michelangelo Antonioni in the early 1950s. Later in the decade, French directors including Alain Resnais (b. 1922), Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut (1932–1984), Claude Chabrol (b. 1930), and Eric Rohmer (b. 1920) directed their first features and were collectively dubbed the "Nouvelle Vague," or New Wave. The definitive "art house" films created by these filmmakers include Bergman's Smultron stället ( The Seventh Seal , 1957) and Wild Strawberries (1957), Visconti's Rocco e i suoi fratelli ( Rocco and His Brothers , 1960), Fellini's La Dolce Vita ( The Sweet Life , 1960) and 8½ (1963), and Antonioni's L'Avventura , La Notte ( The Night , 1961), and L'Eclisse ( Eclipse , 1962). The key films from the French New Wave included Chabrol's Le Beau Serge ( Handsome Serge , 1959), Godard's À bout de souffle ( Breathless , 1960), Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour ( Hiroshima My Love , 1959) and L'Année dernière à Marienbad ( Last Year at Marienbad , 1961), and Truffaut's Les Quatre cents coups ( The 400 Blows , 1959). Such films also produced a galaxy of "art film stars" who were often closely associated with particular directors. Major examples include the work of Liv Ullman (b. 1938), Ingrid Thulin (1929–2004), Max Von Sydow (b. 1929), and Harriet Andersson (b. 1932) with Bergman; Monica Vitti's (b. 1931) work with Antonioni; Giulietta Masina (1921–1994) and Marcello Mastroianni's (1924–1996) work with Fellini; Jean-Pierre Léaud's (b. 1944) work with Truffaut; Anna Karina's (b. 1940) work with Godard; and Stéphane Audran's (b. 1932) work with Chabrol. Other stars of the art film not as closely linked to particular directors include Catherine Deneuve (b. 1943), Jeanne Moreau (b. 1928), Jean-Louis Trintignant (b. 1930), Alain Delon (b. 1935), Dirk Bogarde (1921–1999), and Terence Stamp (b. 1939).



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