Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
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 cine´ 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
Bun˜uel’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 Popio´l diament (Ashes and Diamonds,
1958). There were also a number of ‘‘new waves’’ including young filmmakers from Central Europe such as
Milos ˇ Forman (b. 1932), Vera Chytilova ˘ ´ (b. 1929), and
Jir ˇ´ı Menzel (b. 1938) from the former Czechoslovakia,
Miklo´s Jancso´ (b. 1921) from Hungary, Jerzy
Skolimowski (b. 1938) and Roman Polan´ski (b. 1933)
from Poland, and Dus ˇan 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 Schlo¨ndorff (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).